The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint 
by Rudolph Bell and Cristina Mazzoni.
Chicago, 320 pp., £21, March 2003, 0 226 04196 4
Read More
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux 
by Kathryn Harrison.
Weidenfeld, 160 pp., £14.99, November 2003, 0 297 84728 7
Read More
The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty 
by Helen King.
Routledge, 196 pp., £50, September 2003, 0 415 22662 7
Read More
Show All

You need to sign in or subscribe to read more articles

Subscribe and get unlimited access to our complete archive

Subscribe

We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online. When the blessed are turned out at such a rate, the most they can hope for is a listing by nationality. In the current listings there are 103 Korean martyrs, 96 Vietnamese martyrs, 122 left over from the Spanish Civil War (with another batch of 45 in their wake), and a hundred-plus who have been hanging around since the French Revolution. And for the canonised, the site lists nine full saints for 2002 alone, though this is a considerable fall-back from the glory days of 1988, when more than a hundred came marching in.

Under previous popes, they dawdled along, at the rate of one or two a year. Gemma Galgani became a saint in 1940, in the reign of Pius XII. It was a rapid promotion, by the standard of those days. After a miserable life, Gemma died of TB in 1903, when she was 25. She is an old-fashioned saint, Italian, passive, repressed, yet given to displays of flamboyant suffering – to public and extreme fasting and self-denial, to the exhibition of torn and bleeding flesh. Her behaviour recalled the gruesome penitential practices of her medieval foremothers and resembled that of the ‘hysterics’ of her own day, whose case histories promoted the careers of Charcot, Janet, Breuer and Freud. But we can’t quite consign Gemma to history, to the dustbin of outmoded signs and symptoms or the waste-tip of an age of faith. When we think of young adults in the West, driven by secular demons of unknown provenance to starve and purge themselves, and to pierce and slash their flesh, we wonder uneasily if she is our sister under the skin.

Gemma is far less famous than her contemporary Thérèse of Lisieux, whose remains a short while ago went on a four-month US tour. Thérèse also died of TB, in 1897, just short of her 25th birthday. Her illness was excruciating and prolonged. But popular piety preserved the romantic lie about the wasting consumptive and her gentle death; the sordid realities of vomiting and bedsores were suppressed, and her convent’s policy of denying Thérèse pain relief was elevated into suffering gladly embraced. Kathryn Harrison’s short life of Thérèse complements Monica Furlong’s 1987 study, and is in many ways more sympathetic. Neither biographer found the saint easy to like. Despite her sobriquet of the ‘Little Flower’, Thérèse was tough when her saintly interests were at stake. She wanted to enter the Carmelite order at the age of 14, and when the local convent told her to wait she took advantage of a pilgrimage to Rome to harangue Leo XIII, clinging to his knees until attendants carried her off.

Gemma never got near the pope, never managed to get admitted to a convent at any age. They regarded her as too strange and too sick. ‘They don’t want me living,’ she said, ‘but they’ll have me when I’m dead.’ Both Gemma and Thérèse were quite sure they were saints. Thérèse had a fantastic imagination, suffused by fantasies of being flayed alive and boiled in oil, but the spiritual path known as the ‘Little Way’, expounded in her writing, is about the unheroic journey that awaits smaller souls. Thérèse lived within the convent rule, which discouraged displays of zeal, or at least kept news of them behind the grille until the would-be saint’s CV had been worked over.

Please sign in or subscribe to read the full article.

Sign in

Send Letters To:

The Editor
London Review of Books,
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN

letters@lrb.co.uk

Please include name, address, and a telephone number.

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences