A brief text of the great Encyclical Ut Unum Sint summarizes Blessed Gabriella’s entire life. This text emphasizes that the Church does not seek anything for herself and that her authority exists solely to serve love.
“Taught by the events of her history, the Church is committed to freeing herself from every purely human support, to live in depth the Gospel law of the Beatitudes. Conscious that the truth does not impose itself except “by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power”, she seeks nothing for herself but the freedom to proclaim the Gospel. Indeed, her authority is exercised in the service of truth and charity” (Ut Unum Sint 3). We are already familiar with the life of Blessed Gabriella, so it is not necessary that I recount it again. Yet there is another way to know her: through our personal experiences and encounters with her small yet immense presence.Around 1955 or 1956, our Catholic Action magazine asked me to write profiles of young women whose lives embodied Delia Agostini’s yearning. “The ideal is better than life.” So I went to look for the girl who played Maria Goretti in the great movie Cielo sulla Palude, But it turned out to be a disappointing experience. The young actress had grown up and gained weight. She was a poor conversationalist and had been somewhat ruined by the illusion of being a true star. Yet, she was still charming. I almost felt sorry for her.
The same column in our magazine led me to Grottaferrata to write about another girl, Maria Gabriella, whose simple yet radical heroism was then much praised and had brought her to Paradise at the age of 24. She had been seized by the ecumenical ideal, which, at that time, was capturing the attention of the Church and the world.
To enter the narrow space of the monastery of Grottaferrata, one had to pass through a dark green gate. The gate opened onto the road to Frascati and the Castelli Romani. The reception area was a small, dimly lit room. M. Ludgarda’s sister Irene and her mother lived there and served as doorkeepers. Though they were a bit surly and reserved, they were welcoming. From there, we passed through a parlor with heavy grilles and thick curtains that blocked any view of the other side. Yet, right out of that “visual barrier,” M. Assunta would suddenly rush out with her exuberant, jolly, and rowdy vitality. However, her vivacity was immediately tempered by the tender maternity of M. Immacolata, the abbess. So, I began my interview with Blessed Gabriella, which was the purpose of my visit. However, I was truly fascinated by the jocondity and tenderness of these two individuals.Of this interview, I recall only M. Immacolata’s last sentence. I asked her what the secret of La Trappa was, and she answered: “To die sweetly.”
Of course, she was not referring to physical death, but rather to the path of conversion. This path involves dying to oneself with amiability, like a great, luminous smile blossoming out of many tears. Perhaps this was also the secret of a twenty-year-old woman who dedicated her life to the Church’s ideal of uniting all Christians. Gabriella believed it was worth risking her life for this ideal so everyone could return home to the Lord’s unique flock and the vital womb of the Church. I went back to the Abbey of Grottaferrata many times afterward, not because I was attracted to the ecumenical ideal, but because I was fascinated by M. Assunta’s spontaneous, loud joviality, and by M. Immacolata’s simple, intelligent tenderness.
Then I had the chance to meet the novices, and I found myself in the presence of three young women: Gabriella, Angelica, and Bernarda, who just looked alike: same height, same tiny, round faces as clear as spring water. They wore dazzling white monastic habits. I gaped in admiration and wondered: What is the difference between these three and the famous Blessed Gabriella of Unity? Gabriella was like them, with the same youthful charm and white habits. Perhaps they were also in the same state of innocent wonder that Gabriella expressed to her mother in this letter.
“It is truly a great fortune to live here. If we fall, even by accident, one hundred arms are ready to lift us. I live, eat, and sleep under the same roof as Jesus. What more could I want in this miserable mortal life? This place is a true paradise. I have found many sisters here who love me. I could not desire better superiors, even though we cannot talk, we still love each other.”
Gabriella’s exuberant expressions may be due to the euphoria of youth, the charming discovery of her vocation and true identity, and her fresh capacity for wonder. Yet, something much deeper certainly surfaces from these.
Maú, as she was nicknamed, was not someone who was easily carried away by superficial and imaginative enthusiasm, according to her friends and acquaintances in Dorgali. Like any good Sardinian, she was somewhat intractable, gruff, and reserved. She was more inclined to rebellion than encounter and more prone to autonomy than docility. Yet, Blessed Gabriella continued to express her admiration and love for her monastery and community until the end of her life. This is easily perceived when she feels an excruciating nostalgia for her monastery while in the hospital and far from it. She does not long for healing; she simply yearns to return “home” without delay to the “house” she loves, and to her superiors and sisters, whom she loves with faithful tenderness.“The man of faith gains strength by putting himself in the hands of the God who is faithful,” Pope Francis says in Lumen Fidei (LF 10). This is what Gabriella embodied. She put herself completely in God’s hands. The logical consequence of her complete self-surrender to God, her Father, was putting herself in the hands of her superiors and her sisters in her monastery.
Blessed Gabriella’s ecumenical vocation consists in this complete self-surrender.
Entrusting ourselves to God and, through him, to the community that has welcomed us is an existential act of trust that opens us to embracing a dimension as vast as the entire world. It proclaims universal brotherhood. This gesture grows into a cosmic act of humanism. The universal embrace is not a theoretical concept. Rather, it expands from concrete gestures in daily life to universal gestures. As Pope Francis has often repeated,
“Certainly, this invitation could cause many to feel somewhat afraid, thinking that to be a missionary requires leaving their own homes and countries, family and friends. God asks us to be missionaries. But where – where he himself places us… (Homily at the Mass of July 27, 2013).”
Gabriella did not know anything about this, but she lived it out.
This is the first great lesson in holiness, taught by a poor girl who encountered the Lord and did not succumb to “the multiplicity of her desires, disintegrating into a myriad of unconnected instants” (LF 13): trust comes only by faith.
When someone enters a community, she steps into an unfamiliar world. She is not acquainted with its lifestyle, the layout of the house, or her sisters. Upon entering the monastery, she entrusts herself. Although she had some prior understanding from her meeting with the Mistress of Novices, truly entering the heart of this unknown reality requires a profound act of faith in the One who calls us: the God of Abraham, who reveals Himself as a God who speaks and calls us by name. (Cf. LF 8).
We know that mistrust is an evil that easily affects not only modern youth but also adults. The “malady” of doubting, the common practice of testing things out first to see if they are suitable for us, the mechanical and calculated option of choosing only what works, what’s in, what is effective, popular, interesting, and relevant, has, as a consequence, pathological indecision, which we all witness nowadays. It goes by a variety of names: anxiety, depression, perfectionism, fear, emotional insecurity, and many more. But it only has one name: idolatry of the self. Its true name is an intolerance of the mystery of God’s hiddenness and His presence in our lives, which rules out any calculated proof. It is safer to venerate what we can touch, what meets our current needs. The unconscious shatters us, and calculating risk causes us to sink.
Gabriella’s holiness stems from her leap of faith in a mysterious calling. She opens herself to the indefinite pursuit of her own consistency, identity, and adherence to something worthwhile. Gabriella begins to live out her calling by obeying the simple reality of her small town, Dorgali. She helps her mother with household chores, serves the parish priest, and belongs to the Catholic Action group at her parish. She slowly learns to pray silently before the tabernacle. This is not a clear vision, but rather waiting for God’s will to be accomplished in her.
“She had changed…” the neighbors said.
Saying “yes” to a vocation transforms a person. It breaks unnecessary ties, delves deep into one’s conscience, preserves memories, and imbues every gesture with meaning.
It transforms the individual into someone conscious of their own lived experience, giving them a new capacity for vision and relationships, and fostering the mysterious growth of the experience of God’s mercy in their heart. This happened to Gabriella.
Lumen Fidei says, “Faith is not intransigent, but grows in respectful coexistence with others. One who believes may not be presumptuous; on the contrary, truth leads to humility, since believers know that, rather than ourselves possessing truth, it is truth which embraces and possesses us. Far from making us inflexible, the security of faith sets us on a journey; it enables witness and dialogue with all.”
Her life in the monastery will not be different than life at Dorgali. The impact of human misery should never be taken for granted. Even in the monastery, we are tempted by discontentment, grumbling, negative comments, the cult of appearance, and Pharisaic perfectionism. This perfectionism presupposes that we are okay with ourselves and God when we perform the observances perfectly, even though our hearts do not adhere to them. There, too, we experience the falsehood of putting ourselves at the center of everything, the obstinate desire to save face, and the cult of our own “ego.” Gabriella likely experienced the dark side of monastic life, yet she chose to “follow.”
At the core of Gabriella’s monastic experience is the remarkable figure of M. Pia: a woman of extraordinary faith, intuition, Eucharistic passion, and ecclesial spirit. Gabriella was certainly fascinated by her and followed her with filial tenderness. M. Pia endured difficulties and experienced the unfaithfulness of her followers. Yet, at her school, Gabriella quickly learned that loving means believing, that affection requires faith, and that following means internalizing the word we receive.
In the Report of a Regional Conference of our Order, they stated: “Traditionally, death to self to live for Christ takes place through monastic obedience, which involves renouncing our will, ideas, and plans. However, there has been a crisis of authority and obedience, resulting in a lack of trust in authority as the representative of Christ, through whom one can know the will of God, renounce one’s own will, and find one’s true self while dying to one’s false self.” I don’t think this is a problem of today, as the Lantao Conference seems to claim, but rather a problem that has always existed. Man’s proud autonomy has always rebelled against faithful trust and surrendering himself. It has rejected authentic sonship, which recognizes that God is the origin of all that we are, all that we have, and all that we live for. Those who represent God show us the path of freedom and truth so that we may adhere to his will and mystery.
While Moses spoke with God on Mount Horeb, the Israelites built the Golden Calf.
They wanted a user-friendly god who would walk with them and be made by their hands.
Gabriella also crosses her Red Sea and decides to follow, to trust. She is not a “santerellina (saintly girl)” She loses her patience, she rebels, she knocks violently on the abbess’s door because she wants to be listened to immediately and demands to be proven right.
She is like all of us.
Nevertheless, she fundamentally obeys and continues to be in love with her community, her monastery – this is paradise -, her abbess and her sisters; she wants to follow. She trusts.
How could she define the large house of Grotta as a paradise? It is difficult to pinpoint.
The sisters indeed kept it with great care. Floors were polished. The house had that certain flavor of simple, clean beauty that always flourishes in the house of God. True beauty never blooms from costly furniture, but from the loving details that shine through simple things, even if they are poor.
When Gabriella made her simple profession, she wrote her mother with confident conviction that she was a queen.
“I tell you the lilies of the field are better dressed than Solomon in all his splendor,” Jesus says. “I feel I am a queen”, Gabriella says.
What makes little Gabriella great is her secret, humble joy of belonging and her freely received predilection. She knows she belongs to someone, and she wants to belong to someone, too. A boundless joy seizes her, possesses her, and gives firmness to her desires. In essence, Gabriella’s holiness lies in her ability to allow herself to be transformed, penetrated, and possessed.
We call this growth in freedom and truth humility. Gabriella was not born humble, but she became humble.
Although we immediately perceive our “I” at the instinctive level of our being because of our fundamental life needs and desires, we know that our true identity emerges slowly through real maturation and self-knowledge. Humility is what truly reveals a person’s maturation. It is the summit of human intelligence, where freedom and truth meet. Along the monastic path, humility is achieved only through faith and entrusting oneself to the person who represents the Lord in our lives. In Gabriella, we find a mature and conscious humility, evident in simple gestures proper to those aware of their evil and nothingness. “She would kneel and strike her breast. She always pleaded guilty, even when a general observation was made. She was ready to receive a reproach, and she remained silent.” Above all, her humility is revealed by her ability to listen with a heart penetrated by faith.
This is why Mother Pia’s announcement about Father Couturier’s proposal, asking for donations and prayers for the ecumenical initiatives he intended to undertake, resonated so strongly with her.
It is a radical and intense resonance that blooms from her humility and freedom. “What am I worthy of? Nothing… therefore I can offer everything.” Through her abbess, she asks the Lord for permission to offer her life for the ecumenical cause. “I am worthless anyway…”
The permission is given with prudence and reticence, but Gabriella does not hesitate. The Lord who knows her through and through takes her as a host on the altar of the world and of time. “For the believer who is transformed by the love to which he has opened himself in faith,” Lumen Fidei tells us, “existence expands beyond himself… In faith, the believer’s self expands to be inhabited by another, and thus his life expands in love. In this way, the believer’s existence becomes ecclesial existence. Faith is not a private matter, an individualistic conception, or a subjective opinion; rather, it arises from listening and is destined to become proclamation” (Lumen Fidei passim 21-22).
The moment of offering oneself can also be exhilarating, like the initial “yes” to one’s first love or vocation, but illness, hospital, pain, and death are certainly not exhilarating. Nothing can be taken for granted on the path to fulfillment, even if motivated by a great cause. Illness brings with it the extreme existential loneliness of human powerlessness in the face of pain. The step towards the ultimate goal of life always requires a very high act of faith and abandonment that overcomes all despair, and one never crosses the threshold of existence without the tears of the original struggle for survival. Gabriella learned that beyond the normal, long groaning of human nature, made to live, the ability to listen and obey always remains intact in the depths of the soul. At the moment of her agony, when her abbess asked if she wanted to remain faithful to her vow, she answered with certainty and strength, despite her suffering. There was no dismay or lament in her, only pain, life, and an ineffable love exuding from her littleness. Like a springtime flower, like a secret scent of violets hidden in the depths of the mysterious forest, like the joyous tolling of festive bells that accompanied the moment of her definitive embrace with divine Love, she seemed to say: “This house is like a paradise… paradise is now given.”
This is the story of a humble heart that desired to embrace the world and dedicate her life to fulfilling God’s plan by offering it to the eternal Shepherd of one flock. She lived in his Word and wanted to offer her life out of her passion for a united Church, born from the Blood of Jesus shed on the cross.
“The transmission of the faith not only brings light to men and women in every place; it travels through time, passing from one generation to another. Because faith is born of an encounter that takes place in history and lights up our journey through time, it must be passed on in every age. It is through an unbroken chain of witnesses that we come to see the face of Jesus” (LF 38). Gabriella is a small link in this chain, but a precious link.
“Self-knowledge is only possible when we share in a greater memory… the memory of the Church… which unites every age and makes us contemporaries of Jesus” (LF 38); and therefore contemporaries of Gabriella.
No one is left out of her offering, no one is excluded from her path of littleness and entrustment, which has made her so great in the eyes of the Most High.
It surpasses our understanding that such a humble, silent, and docile gesture, though highly meaningful, had such wide appeal in secular, ecclesiastical, and monastic circles, not only Catholic ones.
Gabriella’s offering indeed represents the profound tension towards the unity of believers which animated the great priestly figures in the Church of the XX century but Gabriella’s offering would be incomprehensible without the great figure of M. Pia, with her exceptional intuition of the path of faith “which is never a private relationship between the “I” of the believer and the divine “Thou,” between an autonomous subject and God. By its very nature, faith is open to the “We” of the Church; it always takes place within her communion (LF 39).
Closer to us is the unforgettable figure of Fr. Paolino Beltrame Quattrocchi. He was a tireless organizer, a courageous innovator, and a prophet of the ecclesial path. He enthusiastically embraced the liturgical explosion of his time and recognized the need for saints, who provide light and strength to the Church and our human experience. We owe the grace of the beatification of Maria Gabriella to him. She was a frail monastic figure suspended on the bridge of communion between the imposing Orthodox Church of Saint Sophia and the magnificent Anglican Cathedral of Lincoln. (Tapestry for the Beatification.)
Of this feast of faith, held in the Basilica of Saint Paul, on January 25, 1983, the last day of the week of prayer for Christian unity, I remember above all the ascetic and pensive face of Brother Roger Schutz and the worried, anxious but joyful face of M. Giovanna Recchia, who offered to the Pope the gifts of our community. Yet, my heart still burns when I remember the Sardinian people’s overwhelming singing. They greeted John Paul II’s entrance into the basilica with the famous Sardinian “Hail Mary,” a composition in the Sardinian dialect of unspeakable beauty. They were a people who sang. They were simple, probably poor people who wore the heavy Sardinian customs. They were God’s people. The infinite echo of this song should have reached Gabriella, who is vibrant in the light of God. She must have certainly felt connected to her people, the people of Dorgali—the Cistercian monastic people. ◼
