BLESSED GERARDESCA OF PISA
Gerardesca, a native of Pisa, Italy, and her husband Alferio were a childless couple. Gerardesca devoted herself to prayer and fasting. It was her daily custom not to eat or drink anything until she had gone to church and offered to God six hundred genuflections.
Gerardesca and Alferio mutally decided to separate so that they might consecrate their lives to God. Alferio entered a Camaldolese monastery. Gerardesca became a Third Order Camaldolese religious, living alone in a cell near her husband’s monastery.
She experienced many visions of Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the saints, on one occasion seeing Christ leading souls out of purgatory to heaven.
A woman whose son, a soldier, was gravely ill asked for Gerardesca’s prayers. Gerardesca knelt and prayed fervently for the son’s healing. She then experienced a vision in which she found herself in a fragrant meadow filled with roses and other flowers. Christ appeared to her, and she prostrated herself, bathing his pierced feet with her tears. He assured her that the son would recover and outlive his mother, a promise that was thereafter fulfilled.
“To be near God is my happiness. I have made the Lord God my refuge.”
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