BLESSED M.GABRIELLA SAGHEDDU (1914 – 1939)
Maria Sagheddu was born in Dorgali, Sardinia, in the Diocese of Nuoro, on March17, 1914. Testimony from the period of her childhood and adolescence speaks of Maria’s strong-willed character, not inclined to compromise. For her, yes was yes and no was no. We know that as a teenager she had difficulty practising her religion. She used to say, “Catholic Action is a serious matter”.
At the age of 18, a personal encounter with the Lord took place in Maria, the circumstances of which are unknown. Certainly the death of her father, a shepherd, and siblings, marked her life with pain, causing her to question about the meaning of life.
This led her to wholeheartedly embrace prayer and the private and public practice of religion.
At the parish she enrolled in Catholic Action, participated in it with liveliness, becoming a catechist. At the age of 21 she chose to consecrate herself entirely to God and, following the instructions of his spiritual father, the assistant parish priest Fr. Basilio Meloni, she entered the Trappist monastery of Grottaferrata (Rome).
In the monastery, her life appears to have been dominated by a few essential elements:
-The first and most visible of these was gratitude for the mercy with which God had called her to belong exclusively to Him. Comparing herself to the prodigal son, welcomed anew in the Father’s house, she repeated “thank you”: for the monastic vocation, for the house, for her superiors, for her sisters, for everything. “How good the Lord is!” was her continual exclamation, and this gratitude was to penetrate even the final moments of her illness and her agony
-The second element was the desire to respond to grace with all her strength, so that what the Lord had begun in her be brought to fulfillment, that the will of God be fulfilled, because there she found true peace.
Her brief cloistered life (three and a half years) was simply spent in the daily commitment to conversion, to follow Christ. Sr. Maria Gabriella felt defined by the vocation to give herself entirely to the Lord.
Ever since 1936 at Grottaferrata, during Abbess Mother Pia Gullini’s leadership, the community took interest in the ideal of ecumenism, thanks to the initiatives of Father Paul Couturier, a priest from Lyons, France. When at the beginning of the 1938 Church Unity Octave Mother Pia presented the sisters with the request to pray and make offerings for the cause of Christian unity, Sr. Maria Gabriella immediately felt drawn, impelled to offer her young life. “I feel that the Lord asks it of me,” she confided to the Abbess, “I feel impelled even though I don’t want to think about it.”
Sr. Maria Gabriella had no experience of the separation of Christians, nor had she ever studied the history of ecumenism. She was simply dominated by the desire that all people might return to God and that His Kingdom might come into every human heart. She had already offered herself for this by embracing the humble and silent life of a Trappist nun with its daily renunciation and its long hours of hard work and prayer. “As for me, I feel that I have already given all that it was in my power to give”, she had written frankly to her spiritual father.
Travelling along a path both speedy and direct, she tenaciously handed herself over to obedience, aware of her fragility, intent on the single desire for “the will of God, his glory.” Gabriella attained the freedom that drove her towards conformity to Jesus, who having “loved his own in the world, loved them to the end.” Faced with the lacerated Body of Christ, she sensed the urgency to offer herself, which she carried out with a faithful consistency up to the point of being consumed. Abounding in health up to that time, tuberculosis appeared in the young sister’s body the very day of her offering, leading to a death that followed fifteen months of suffering.
On April 23, 1939, her brief and intense life came to an end, in total abandonment to the will of God. It was the Sunday of the Good Shepherd and the Gospel proclaimed: “There will be one flock and one shepherd.”
