Saint Veronica Giuliani (1660-1727)

Key dates

A Family of the Papal Marches

Orsola Giuliani was born on 27 December 1660 at Mercatello sul Metauro, a small town nestled at the foot of the Apennines, on the banks of the Metauro, in the Duchy of Urbino attached to the Papal States.^[10][11] She was the last of seven daughters of Francesco Giuliani, a customs official, and Benedetta Mancini.^[12][13] Three of her sisters would also embrace the religious life.

Her mother died in 1665, when Orsola was only five. Tradition reports that, on her deathbed, Benedetta entrusted each of her daughters to one of the five wounds of Christ: to Orsola fell the wound in the side, the one that leads to the heart — a detail posterity would read as a prophecy of her vocation.^[14] When Francesco was appointed to Piacenza, around 1668, the little girl followed him; but the attraction of the cloister only grew stronger.

A Childhood Seized by the Passion

The hagiographical sources agree on Orsola's early piety. The Catholic Encyclopedia reports that as a child she gave away her food to the poor and stood transfixed before images of the Passion.^[15] Very early on, love of the suffering Christ was imprinted in her as the dominant note of her whole life. Her French biographer, the Countess de Villermont, sums up this trait:

"Few saints received as she did the mission to suffer; indeed, it may be said that none seems to have surpassed her in the violence of her torments and the intensity of her compassion for the Redeemer's sufferings." — Countess Marie de Villermont, Sainte Véronique Giuliani, 1910^[16]

This attraction to the Cross has nothing of morbid complacency about it: in Veronica, it is the reverse side of a burning love. Her whole doctrine will fit into this conviction that suffering accepted out of love is the shortest road to union with God.

A Vocation Against Her Father's Will

Orsola's father long opposed her vocation. A widower, he dreamed of a fine marriage for his favorite daughter and presented her with suitors.^[17][18] The young girl resisted; according to the old accounts, a mysterious illness nailed her to her bed for as long as her father refused his consent, and vanished the instant he yielded — a sign she interpreted as divine approval.^[19]

On 28 October 1677, at seventeen, Orsola finally crossed the enclosure of the Capuchin Poor Clares of Città di Castello, in Umbria.^[20][21] There she made her solemn profession on 1 November 1678, All Saints' Day.^[22]

The Name Veronica: the "True Image" of the Passion

On receiving the habit, Orsola took the name Veronica. The choice was no accident: according to tradition, Veronica means vera icon, the "true image" — a reference to the veil of Saint Veronica on which Christ is said to have left the imprint of his suffering face on the way to Calvary.^[23] The name already expressed the nun's whole vocation: to become, in her very flesh, a living image of the Crucified One.

Mistress of Novices: a Pedagogy of Humility

In the monastery, Veronica first passed through the humblest tasks — kitchen, sacristy, infirmary. Soon, despite her youth, she was entrusted with the office of mistress of novices, which she would exercise for more than thirty years.^[24][25] Her pedagogy surprises: she forbade her novices to read the great mystical treatises and constantly brought them back to the "foundations of the Christian life" — humility, obedience, everyday charity.^[26]

This trait illuminates her whole spiritual countenance: the most extraordinary mystic of her century distrusted the extraordinary. She knew from experience that sensible graces are a free gift, and that holiness is played out first in fidelity to small things.

Veronica's interior life accelerated from 1693, which she herself called the beginning of her "thirty-three years of supernatural sufferings" — as many years as the earthly life of Christ.^[27] In four years followed one another the highest graces of nuptial and Passion mysticism.

The Mystical Marriage (1694)

On 11 April 1694, Veronica lived the mystical marriage: Christ took her as his spouse, slipped a spiritual ring on her finger and united her to himself in an intimacy that the great mystics — Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Teresa of Avila — had described before her. In her Diary, it is Christ himself who speaks:

"I made you rest in my bosom; you knew union with my soul." — Christ to Saint Veronica, Diary, quoted by Benedict XVI^[28]

This nuptial union was not a summit of consolation, but the threshold of a mission: to be associated more closely with the redemptive Passion.

The Crown of Thorns (1694)

That same year, Veronica received the imprint of the crown of thorns. According to her account, Christ appeared to her wearing the crown, removed it from his own head and pressed it onto the nun's brow.^[29][30] Reddish marks, like thorn pricks, then appeared on her forehead and persisted, visible, for years — one of them reaching her eye, mingling blood with her tears.^[31] Far from asking for healing, Veronica begged for the grace of loving in pain:

"My Lord, grant me this crown, so that the pricks of its thorns may become so many voices enabling me to love you." — Saint Veronica Giuliani, Diary^[32]

The Transverberation of Christmas 1696

At Christmas 1696, kneeling before the crib, Veronica had the vision of the Child Jesus holding a bow and arrow: he shot the dart toward her heart, piercing it with a wound of love that would never quite close again.^[33][34] This transverberation — the same grace as that of Saint Teresa of Avila — left in her a burning interior wound. A few weeks earlier, on 5 December 1696, she had received her first vision of hell, offering her sufferings for the conversion of sinners.^[35]

The Stigmata of Good Friday 1697

The summit of this ascent was reached on Good Friday, 5 April 1697. During prayer, Veronica saw five rays spring from the wounds of the Crucified One and turn into flames striking her hands, her feet and her side. She then received the stigmata:

"In an instant, I saw five resplendent rays come forth from his holy wounds and come all toward me; they pierced my heart through and through, and the nails went through my hands and my feet." — Saint Veronica Giuliani, Diary^[36]

The wounds in her hands and feet would bleed for nearly three years, until Veronica herself, burdened at being so noticed, obtained from Christ that the visible flow cease around 1700; but the wound in her side would continue to bleed intermittently until her death.^[37][38] With these marks appeared the mysterious wound in the shoulder, that of the carrying of the cross, which deformed the bone without ever hindering her movements.^[39]

A Mystic Put to the Test

Far from welcoming these phenomena with credulity, the Church subjected them to an investigation of formidable severity. The Bishop of Città di Castello, Msgr Luca Antonio Eustachi, and the saint's confessor, Fr. Girolamo Bastianelli, acting in liaison with the Roman Holy Office, multiplied the controls to rule out any illusion or deception.^[40][41] The logic was that of the criteria Benedict XIV would soon codify: a phenomenon is credible only if it produces humility, charity and obedience.

The table below summarizes the main measures of discernment applied to Veronica, and their outcome.

The Heroism of Submission

It was precisely in this trial that Veronica's holiness was revealed. Deprived of everything, watched, humiliated, she obeyed without a single complaint or sign of sadness, to the point that the bishop had to acknowledge before Rome that the phenomena bore the fruits of God.^[42][43] The episode of the sandals remained famous: bidden by Christ to walk barefoot, overruled by her confessor, she kept her shoes until her feet swelled atrociously — and it was only on seeing the coincidence of the ailment with the interior order that the bishop finally yielded.^[44]

The restrictions would not be fully lifted until 1716, the very year the community, far from holding her suspect, elected her abbess.^[45]

Genesis of a Diary Written Under Obedience

It was within this investigation that Veronica's written work was born. From 1693, at the order of her bishop and her confessors, she was compelled to write down each day her interior experiences, so that authority could examine them.^[46][47] She wrote at night, in her cell, without crossings-out or plan, in a spontaneous flow, until the eve of her death.

The result was a staggering manuscript. Benedict XVI specified its scope:

"She left us a Diary of about twenty-two thousand manuscript pages, covering a period of thirty-four years." — Benedict XVI, General Audience of 15 December 2010^[48]

A Hidden Treasure of the Spirituality of the Passion

Long unpublished, the Diary was printed from 1899 under the title Un tesoro nascosto ("A Hidden Treasure"), through the care of Fr. Pietro Pizzicaria, in several volumes.^[49] This journal, at once an account of ecstasies and trials, is one of the densest mystical sources of the Baroque age. When Pius IX read it for the first time, he is said to have exclaimed:

"She is no ordinary saint: she is a very great saint." — Pius IX, quoted by the Countess de Villermont^[50]

Veronica's voice in it is turned entirely toward sinners, whom she never ceases to urge back to mercy:

"O sinful men and women… come all to the heart of Jesus; come to the bath of his precious blood." — Saint Veronica Giuliani, Diary, quoted by Benedict XVI^[51]

Her consciousness as spouse of the Crucified One culminates in the experience of being sheltered in the very wound of Christ:

"I found myself in the arms of the Crucified One. What I then felt, I cannot say: I would have wished to remain forever in his most holy side." — Saint Veronica Giuliani, Diary^[52][53]

Elected abbess on 5 April 1716, Veronica governed her community for eleven years with a practical sense that nothing in her mystical life would have suggested.^[54][55] She administered the monastery prudently, watched over the regularity of the common life and had, notably, a water supply system installed to spare the sisters the chore of carrying buckets up to the infirmary.^[56]

This alliance of ecstasy and common sense is one of the most striking traits of her holiness. As Thérèse of Lisieux would later say in her own way, spiritual greatness does not dispense from the duty of one's state: Veronica passed without break from the vision of the Crucified One to the management of a well.

The Stroke and the Agony

On 6 June 1727, Veronica was struck by a stroke which paralyzed her.^[57] There followed an agony of thirty-three days — once more the number of the years of Christ — which she went through in luminous peace. She died at dawn on 9 July 1727, at sixty-six. Her last words, which became the summary of her whole life, were gathered by her sisters:

"I have found Love, Love has let himself be seen! This is the cause of my suffering. Tell it to all!" — Last words of Saint Veronica Giuliani^[58][59]

The Autopsy and the Heart

The Holy Office, to authenticate the phenomena, ordered an autopsy, performed by the surgeon Giovanni Francesco Gentili before the bishop and many witnesses.^[60][61] Two discoveries struck those present. First, the shoulder bone proved "completely curved and displaced", as if crushed by the carrying of a burden, although the saint had always used both arms without the slightest difficulty.^[62] Then and above all, examination of the heart brought to light, engraved in the muscle, the figures of the instruments of the Passion — cross, lance, nails, column, scourge — which Veronica had announced during her lifetime and had even drawn in advance at her confessor's order.^[63][64]

This "eucharistic heart", kept as a relic in the Città di Castello monastery, gave the investigation a singular probative force: the mystic's flesh visibly bore what her Diary described.^[65]

The Cause and the Church's Recognition

Veronica's cause was conducted with the customary prudence. Her virtues were recognized as heroic in 1796 under Pius VI; she was beatified on 17 June 1804 by Pius VII, then canonized on 26 May 1839 by Gregory XVI, at the close of a process supported by the testimony of bishops, spiritual directors and nuns, and by attested miracles.^[66][67] Her feast is fixed on 9 July (on 10 July in the Capuchin calendar).^[68]

Veronica holds a rare place in the history of mysticism: her stigmata rank among the very rare ones the Church has recognized at the close of a canonization process, with those of Saint Francis of Assisi.^[69]

"A Very Great Saint": Benedict XVI and the Memory of Veronica

On 15 December 2010, approaching the 350th anniversary of her birth, Benedict XVI devoted an entire catechesis to Saint Veronica Giuliani. In it he presented her life as a school of union with Christ through self-gift: the nun, he wrote, understood her contemplative vocation as a mission of intercession at the heart of the world.^[70]

"We cannot go out preaching through the world and converting souls, but we are bound to pray without ceasing." — Saint Veronica Giuliani, Diary, quoted by Benedict XVI^[71]

The heart of Veronica's spirituality lies in a paradox Benedict XVI highlighted: for her, "suffering with joy" is the "key to love".^[72] Suffering is never sought for itself, but as the place where love proves itself and unites itself to the crucified Love. In this, Veronica belongs to the great line of victim souls and mystics of the Passion, from Saint Paul of the Cross to Saint Gemma Galgani and Padre Pio.

Three traits sum her up. First an absolute Christocentrism: everything in her leads back to the suffering and risen Christ. Then a nuptial and reparative dimension: spouse of the Crucified One, she offers herself for the conversion of sinners and the needs of the Church. Finally an unfailing obedience, which makes her mystical life, extraordinary as it is, a school of humility. Her trust rested, she said, on the Pauline certainty become experience: "If God is for us, who can be against us?"^[73]

It is this unity — love, suffering, joy — that her last words express, and that makes her, three centuries later, a guide for all who seek the Christian meaning of the Cross.

• Saint Paul of the Cross (1694-1775) — Veronica's contemporary and founder of the Passionists, another great master of the spirituality of the Passion.
• Saint Gemma Galgani — Passionist stigmatist and victim soul, heiress of the same mysticism of the Cross.
• Saint Padre Pio — the most famous of modern stigmatists, whose experience illuminates Veronica's.
• Saint Francis of Assisi — the first recognized stigmatist in Church history, with whom Veronica is often associated.
• Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) — Neapolitan contemporary, master of devotion to the Passion and trusting love.
• Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) — for the same intuition that holiness is lived in the duty of one's state and in small things.