ST GALLA, WIDOW - 5 OCTOBER

 

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN OCTOBER

Saints celebrated on the 5th of October

 Prayer to the Angels and the Saints

Heavenly Father, in praising Your Angels and Saints we praise Your glory, for by honouring them we honour You, their Creator. Their splendour shows us Your greatness, which infinitely surpasses that of all creation.

In Your loving providence, You saw fit to send Your Angels to watch over us. Grant that we may always be under their protection and one day enjoy their company in heaven.

Heavenly Father, You are glorified in Your Saints, for their glory is the crowning of Your gifts. You provide an example for us by their lives on earth, You give us their friendship by our communion with them, You grant us strength and protection through their prayer for the Church, and You spur us on to victory over evil and the prize of eternal glory by this great company of witnesses.

Grant that we who aspire to take part in their joy may be filled with the Spirit that blessed their lives, so that, after sharing their faith on earth, we may also experience their peace in heaven. Amen.

ST GALLA, WIDOW 

She was daughter to Symmachus the Younger, the great, the most learned and virtuous patrician of Rome, whom Theodoric unjustly and barbarously put to death. 

From her cradle she gave herself fervently to the service of God, and being married very young, lost her husband before the end of the first year. 

She could have yet pleased the world, and was strongly solicited and courted by it, but her only desire in it was to please God alone; and trampling upon the world amidst its honours and riches, she considered herself as freed by her state of widowhood from its distractions. 

Out of devotion to the apostles she chose for her dwelling a little cottage or cell near their tombs on the Vatican hill, where she never interrupted her devotions but by other good works. 

The revenues of her great estates were made the patrimony of the poor; and, by her austerities, which reduced her body to a mere skeleton, she made herself a holocaust to penance. 

The prayers and spiritual instructions to the greatest saints and prelates who at that time adorned the Western church, were a tribute to her piety and fervour; which, among other means of her sanctification, she sought with great earnestness.  

The pious letters which St Fulgentius wrote to her from the place of his banishment, are extant amongst his works. 

After a train of tedious distempers, she was afflicted during the last years of her life with a cancer in her breast. She suffered extreme pains with incredible patience and resignation, and by them finished the martyrdom of her penance about the middle of the sixth age. 

(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints)