Saint Gabriel is allowed to bind himself to Our Lady for life

ISOLA DEL GRAN SASSO, Abruzzi, 1861 AD — For five years Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows asked his superiors for permission to make a promise, and for five years they refused him. This year they granted it, and the young Passionist of the retreat here bound himself by vow, for the rest of his life, to spread devotion to the Mother of God as far as he was able. He is twenty-three, a student in minor orders, and since the summer the community has watched him waste.

He was born Francesco Possenti at Assisi and grew up at Spoleto, where his father, Sante Possenti, sat as judge of the supreme court until he retired three years ago. On September 21, 1856 AD, the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, he was clothed in the Passionist habit at the novitiate of Morrovalle and took her name. He began asking for the vow almost at once. The objection his superiors made was that a vow is a grave thing to undertake, and that a perpetual one can be regretted when it is too late to undo it. So for five years they made him wait and prove what he was.

Isola is a small town in the mountains of the Abruzzi, between two rivers that rise in the Gran Sasso chain, and the retreat is an old house among oaks and mountain torrents under the massif. The war for the unification of Italy reached the district last year. Armed bands crossed it daily, and the men in the retreat could hear the guns of the fortress at Civitella del Tronto. One night a band of them surrounded the monastery and demanded food. The disturbances have gone on around the retreat through this year, and St. Gabriel wrote to his father in the middle of them: “That sweet Virgin of Sorrows who cannot look without compassion upon our misery, keeps us safe enough under her protecting mantle; and the very swords that transpierce her blessed and most pure heart, she uses for our defence.”

For five years he gave his superiors their evidence in small daily instalments. St. Gabriel kept a corner of the cloister garden for flowers for Our Lady and called it her Bower. Whenever he could, he cut a vase of those flowers for her altar. He nursed ferns and potted plants through the winter so that the altar was never bare. He said a Hail Mary at every stroke of the hour. He asked his confessor to let him go on doing it through the night as well, and the confessor refused, telling him that Our Lady would be better pleased if her champion took the sleep the rule allowed him. For the forty days before the Assumption, a season he called Our Lady’s Lent, he went without fruit and sweet things. He liked both, and they were then at their best. He also wrote out a creed of his own for her, built from sentences he had gathered out of the doctors of the Church. It opens: “I believe, O Mary, that thou art the mother of all men.”

On May 25 he received the tonsure and the four minor orders in the cathedral at Penne, from Bishop Vincenzo d’Alfonso. The same arrangements set his ordination as subdeacon for the ember days of September, one of the four times in the year when the Church confers orders.

Through the summer that followed, the community watched him begin visibly to waste. He kept the whole timetable anyway — the midnight rising for matins, the hour of office, the half hour of mental prayer after it, prime and tierce in the morning. In summer the students went down to the lower choir for mental prayer, and the little bell that called them was often missed, because whoever had the job was careless or could not hear the clock at that distance. The Rector gave the job to St. Gabriel, and after that the signal was never once missed. He had set the rule down in writing: “I will be punctual. I will obey the sound of the bell as if it were the very voice of God.”

By the time the permission came he was failing, and the least effort tired him. He told one of the brothers what he had been granted and asked for help, and the two of them dressed a small chapel of Our Lady inside the monastery as though for a great feast. That evening he made the vow into the hands of his spiritual director, Father Norbert of St. Mary, with nobody else in the house told but the brother who had helped him. Father Norbert put the result in a single line: “This he did, to the unspeakable joy of his heart, and to the great profit of his soul.”

The subdiaconate did not follow in September. He told his father that there had been no bishops to ordain him, and that he was left in minor orders. By December the illness had broken out into the wasting fever of consumption and left him very weak.

He wrote to his father that month about the ordination that had not taken place: “At this hour, perhaps, I should be a priest, were it not that the ordination was postponed, thus leaving me now with only minor orders. But God has so willed. And as He wills, so do I.”