Satan, finding all his machinations set at naught by this child, became furious. Throwing off the mask, he took to waging open war against her. He appeared to her repeatedly in horrible forms: at one time as a savage dog, at another as a hideous monster, again as a man in a fury.
He used to begin by terrifying her with his horrible and threatening appearance. Then he rushed on her, beat her, tore her with his teeth, threw her down, dragged her by the hair and in other innumerable ways tortured her innocent body.
No one can attribute these things to mere hallucinations, for their effects were but too real—her hair scattered about the room, the bruises and livid marks that remained for days, the excessive pains she felt in all her members, etc. So also were but too real the noises that were heard of blows and of the shaking of her bed, lifted and then thrown down, as remained to be seen. Nor were these assaults and annoyances things of a few moments. They lasted for hours together without cessation, and even during the whole night.
It would take too long to recount all these painful scenes. They happened very often and sometimes continued for days. The poor victim had become in a certain sense inured to them, and, beyond the bodily sufferings they caused her, she ceased to be alarmed at them. She regarded the hellish monster with a serenity like that of a dove looking at any unclean animal.
Until I forbade it, she used occasionally to answer him contemptuously. When finally overcome by the invocation of the Holy Name of Jesus, he was forced to leave, shuffling precipitately away, the simple child followed him with jubilant laughter. “If you had but seen him, Father,” she wrote to me, “how he ran, and how often he tripped as he fled, and gave vent to his rage, you too would have laughed at him. My God! How fetid he is, and how horrible to look at! But Jesus has told me not to fear him.”
What really frightened her was the fear of offending God by yielding to Satan’s malicious suggestions. Although she was aware of having always so far resisted, the danger nonetheless seemed to her to be always imminent and kept her almost beside herself with fear. There was no remedy that she did not use in order to defend herself against those satanic assaults—crosses, relics of Saints, scapulars, special prayers and, above all, filial recourse to God, to His Heavenly Mother, to her Guardian Angel and to her spiritual director.
ooo
This article is taken from a chapter in The Life of Saint Gemma Galgani by Venerable Fr. Germanus, CP which is available from TAN Books.
