Editorial: Angel-post beats email every time

Saint who did battle with the devil is a model for us all.
One of the truly gratifying and encouraging facts of our faith is the Communion of the Saints and any time of the year is excuse enough to think upon them and rejoice and to editorialise (extemporaneously and at considerable length if one feels so inclined) on why they manifest so astonishingly God’s great goodness and love for us.
A fortnight ago this paper reflected on the occasions of All Saints and All Souls, wonderful and encouraging feasts in the Christian year. However all too often, as someone once said, we Catholics call ourselves a Church of the Resurrection but don’t actually behave very often as though we believe in its truth.
And yet we are, as St Paul wrote in his letter to the Hebrews, constantly surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Paul’s words are a wonderful metaphor and his metaphor is one of great precision. He was writing about the Saints, not only those alive in this life now but those great men and women of faith, some of whose names we know but who, for the greater part, remain largely unknown. The Saints certainly are very much like tiny droplets of water, billions of which form a cloud surrounding us wherever we go.
But we know they are there. And they surround us in any direction we care to look, interceding, reassuring and beckoning us onwards to what so often seems impossible in the ordinariness, the challenges, anxieties and sufferings of our daily lives: the sainthood they now experience forever is the normality we are called to become as well. This is what the Church is for.
Meanwhile, Advent is very nearly upon us and in this wonderful time of preparation and expectation we can reflect that the Saints are also very near.
As we enter Advent, we can also do well to begin to steel ourselves against the onslaught that is coming against our joy when so much of our nation enters into the season of Christmas apparently devoid in any detectable sense of anything to do with Christ. We will see everywhere Christmas advertising and post-Christmas sales, we will be exposed to a blizzard of junk mail in our letterboxes and in our email inboxes, all seeking with something that sounds very much like desperation or fanaticism to persuade us to spend up big for those we love and for ourselves.
We will certainly witness yet again the ongoing efforts to marginalise Christianity as media, companies, government leaders, local authorities and the like awkwardly try to wish us the compliments of the season without actually referring to its reason or its meaning, wishing us all the sentiment but without any of the substance.
These lunacies are annoying, but should not deter us from looking forward to the birth of the Christ Child who is also the child king, an event which can truthfully be described as the explosion into this world of the reality of the spiritual and the world of the spirit – of God.
Meanwhile, it is the Saints whose own lives express and testify so eloquently and remarkably to the truth of the spiritual and the kingdom of God; they gave adequate time in their lives to prayer and reflection and self-denial and it was to the spiritual world that they gave the highest priority in their own daily existence.
Among the most remarkable of the modern Saints is a young woman of extraordinary attractiveness and beauty that very few Catholics know about today, but about whom we should know much more.
St Gemma Galgani was born in 1878 near the Italian town of Lucca and died in 1903. In her 25 short years she became one of the great mystics of modern times, comparable in many ways to St Padre Pio. Two things are important to know about St Gemma: she loved Christ totally, and she beat the Devil. She bore the stigmata and reached such a degree of union with Christ that she was regularly attacked by none other than Satan himself. She knew and could see her guardian angel, spoke with him daily, even getting him to run errands for her such as delivering letters to her spiritual director in other towns and cities.
On one occasion the Devil appeared to her as her confessor, on another as an angel. When temptation failed he beat her violently on numerous occasions, doing things such as dragging her out of bed, dislocating her joints and hitting her head against the wall. On some occasions he appeared as a giant black dog who would attack her in bed. In everything she trusted completely in God.
Her spiritual director, a Passionist Priest, got so used to angelic deliveries of her letters and replies that he eventually gave up testing their reality. One such test was to go to another city that St Gemma would have no idea of – Corneto. While there, he later wrote in her biography, there was a knock at the door and, when he answered it, a small boy presented him with a letter and then walked off. It was, of course, a letter from St Gemma, hand-delivered angelically.
“I always received the angelic letters faithfully. The fact is unusual … I confess I do not understand it at all … To how many tests did I not submit this singular phenomenon in order to convince myself that it took place through a supernatural intervention! And yet none of my tests ever failed; and thus I was convinced again and again…” he wrote.
Once, when the Devil appeared to St Gemma disguising himself as an angel of God, she was so angry when she discovered the trick that she spat in his face. Plucky girl. It is no surprise that in modern times, as recorded in the recently published The Rite: the making of a modern exorcist by journalist Matt Baglio, exorcists know that deliverance is near when demons howl in dismay and fear because St Gemma has appeared to assist the exorcist to deliver the poor souls whose bodies they have possessed. Go, Gemma.