He asked to make one promise, and waited five years

ISOLA DEL GRAN SASSO, Abruzzi, 1861 AD — For five years Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows asked the men in charge of him for permission to make one promise. For five years they said no. The promise was a vow. He wanted to spend the rest of his life spreading devotion to the Mother of God, as far as he was able. He was a Passionist student at a retreat house in the mountains of the Abruzzi. It was an old house among oak trees and mountain streams, under the Gran Sasso.

They said no because a vow is a serious thing to take on. A promise for life can be regretted later, when it is too late to undo. So they made him wait, and prove what he was.

St. Gabriel was born Francesco Possenti at Assisi and grew up at Spoleto. His father, Sante Possenti, was a judge of the supreme court there until he retired three years ago. On September 21, 1856 AD, he was clothed in the Passionist habit at Morrovalle. That day was the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, and he took her name for his own. He began asking for the vow almost straight away.

Five years of small proofs

St. Gabriel kept a corner of the cloister garden for Our Lady’s flowers and called it her Bower. Whenever he could, he cut a vase of those flowers for her altar. He looked after ferns and potted plants all 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. The confessor said no. Our Lady would be better pleased, he told St. Gabriel, if her champion took the sleep the rule allowed him.

For the forty days before the Assumption he ate no fruit and nothing sweet. He called that stretch of time Our Lady’s Lent. He liked fruit and sweet things, and they were at their best just then. He wrote out a creed of his own for her too, put together from sentences he had collected out of the great teachers of the Church. It opens: “I believe, O Mary, that thou art the mother of all men.”

On May 25 this year, in the cathedral at Penne, Bishop Vincenzo d’Alfonso gave him the tonsure and the four minor orders. Then, through the summer, everyone in the retreat watched him begin to waste away. He kept to the whole day’s round anyway. He was up at midnight for the night prayers, then an hour of prayers together, then half an hour of silent prayer, and more prayers in the morning.

One brother, one small chapel

By the time the permission came he was failing, and the smallest effort tired him out. He told one of the brothers what he had been allowed to do, and asked for help. The two of them made a small chapel of Our Lady ready inside the retreat house, as though a great feast were coming.

That evening he made the vow into the hands of his spiritual director, Father Norbert of St. Mary. Nobody else in the house was told but the brother who had helped him. Father Norbert wrote it down in one line: “This he did, to the unspeakable joy of his heart, and to the great profit of his soul.”

In September he was supposed to take the next step towards being a priest. It did not happen. He told his father that no bishop had come to make him a priest, and that he was left with only minor orders. By December the illness had turned into the wasting fever of consumption, and he was very weak.

That month he wrote to his father about the day he should have become a priest: “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.”