Blessed Columba Gabriel

Blessed Columba Gabriel was a Polish Benedictine nun, abbess of the monastery in Lviv, and later the foundress of the Congregation of the Benedictine Sisters of Charity in Rome. The Roman Martyrology says of her that, unjustly slandered, she came to Rome, where she lived poor and joyful. Her memorial falls on September 24.

She was born on May 3, 1858, in Stanisławów, today Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine, into the well-to-do noble family of Rudolf Gabriel and Agnieszka, née Rawska. At her baptism, given on the day of her birth, she received the names Joanna Matylda, and at home she was called Janina. In 1866 the family moved to Lviv, where she attended the school of the Benedictine nuns.

In 1874, at the age of sixteen, she received the habit among the Benedictine nuns of Lviv and the name Columba, which was rare at that time. She earned teaching diplomas and taught in the convent school. She made her perpetual vows in 1882. John Paul II said that already as a young girl she gave Christ her full and sincere “yes,” resolved, following Saint Benedict, to prefer nothing to his love.

From 1889 she was entrusted with one office after another: she was prioress, bursar and novice mistress, and in 1897 she became abbess. She cared for the spiritual and material growth of the monastery and for the poor, who in ever greater numbers knocked at the door asking for help and food. She then faced accusations that the Holy See’s documents call false and slanderous, and in 1900 she had to leave the monastery and go to Rome.

In Rome she was first taken in by the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth of Blessed Frances Siedliska, and then she lived for a time with the Benedictine nuns at Subiaco. She did not shut herself up in her pain. In the districts of Prati and Testaccio she taught the catechism, visited the sick and the dying, and looked after children whose parents worked all day. For poor girls who came to Rome to find work she opened the Family House, supported by a committee of Roman ladies chaired by Princess Barberini.

In 1908 she founded the Congregation of the Benedictine Sisters of Charity. John Paul II saw in it a special gift: the active apostolate of charity grafted onto the contemplative trunk of the Benedictine Rule. According to the letter of beatification, she was a missionary, mother and servant to the girls; she shared her life with them and joyfully bore great poverty. She was helped by the cofoundress Placida Oldoini, who took over the leadership of the congregation after her.

She died on September 24, 1926, in Centocelle, then a very poor district of Rome. She left her sisters a testament: to carry out their task with fervor and love and to do good to all. Her fellow countryman John Paul II declared her blessed on May 16, 1993, in Saint Peter’s Basilica. The miracle recognized for her was the inexplicable recovery of a man from Padua whose heart stopped for at least twenty minutes during an operation in 1982.