Feast day: February 27

St. Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows

Religious · 1838–1862

Patron of Students, young people

A fun-loving Italian youth fond of dancing and the theater who, after a brush with death, became a Passionist and died of tuberculosis at twenty-four in radiant holiness.

Francesco Possenti was born at Assisi in 1838, the eleventh child of a well-to-do family, and grew up a popular, fashionable youth — fond of the theatre, hunting, fine clothes, and dancing, and known in his town as something of a charmer. Twice during serious illness he resolved to enter religious life, and twice recovered and forgot the promise.

A turning point came during a procession of an ancient image of Our Lady, when he seemed to hear her ask him directly why he remained in the world. This time he kept his word, and in 1856 he entered the Passionists, taking the name Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows.

In the cloister he was outwardly unremarkable; his holiness lay entirely in doing ordinary things — community life, study, obedience, devotion to Mary's sorrows — with extraordinary love and cheerfulness. He never became a priest and never did anything the world would notice.

He died of tuberculosis in 1862, only twenty-four years old, at the Passionist retreat at Isola del Gran Sasso. Canonized in 1920, he became one of the most popular modern patrons of students and the young — proof that sanctity is found not in great deeds but in small ones done well.

He was a stylish, theater-loving young man — and became a saint not by great deeds but by doing ordinary things with extraordinary love, dying at twenty-four.

Image: Passionist Fathers (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/06330c.htm