Last Updated on January 6, 2024 by Kittredge Cherry
Saint Galla of Rome was a sixth-century widow who avoided remarriage by growing a beard. She founded a hospital and convent, and begged to have her female beloved Benedicta accompany her into heaven.
Galla’s feast day is Oct. 5 and Benedicta’s is May 6. Galla was important enough to be included among the statues of 140 saints on the colonnade in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome. Her sculpture is pictured above.
Galla’s story is similar to more than a dozen queer saints who who moved from female to male in order to serve God and avoid marriage. An overview of them is presented in “Trans Saints? Early cross-dressing monks and martyrs.” Galla apparently continued to identify as a woman, despite her beard. Q Spirit is pleased to share the following profile of Galla and Benedicta by Terence Weldon, a gay Catholic expert on queer saints.
SS Benedicta, (6 May) and Galla (5 October), Roman nuns – and lovers?
By Terence Weldon
(Reposted from Queering the Church with permission)
One of the curiosities of the Catholic tradition of honouring our saints and martyrs, is how hagiography seamlessly combines historical biography, myth with collective amnesia. The stories of Saints Patrick and Brigid of Ireland, for instance, are replete with well-known legends that have absolutely no verifiable foundation in historical fact, and the delightful story of St Wilgefortis (aka Uncumber), the crucified bearded woman, turns out to have a much more plausible basis in reality. For many other saints, the distortions of hagiography are not just the accretions that are added by popular imagination, but the important details that are so often omitted in the transmission down the ages. St Paulinus, for instance, is widely honoured for his missionary work and for the impressive quality of his Latin devotional poetry. The standard Catholic sources on the saints, however, discreetly omit any reference to his other poetic legacy – equally fine homoerotic verse addressed to his boyfriend, Ausonius.
Mystic and nun. Benedicta lived in a convent founded by St. Galla in Rome. Pope St. Gregory the Great states that St. Peter appeared in a vision to warn her of her approaching death.
This seems innocuous enough, until it set against the parallel warning of imminent death that St Gregory also gave to the better known St Galla.
From a large selection of on-line sources, Wikipedia sums up the key uncontested points of her story, those widely reported elsewhere:
Galla was the daughter of Roman patrician Symmachus the Younger, who was appointed consul in 485. Galla was also the sister-in-law of Boethius. Her father, Symmachus the Younger, was condemned to death, unjustly, by Theodoric in 525. Galla was then married but was soon widowed, just over a year after marriage. It was believed that she grew a beard, to avoid further offers of marriage. Being wealthy, she decided to retreat to the Vatican Hill, and found a hospital and a convent, near St. Peter’s Basilica. Galla is reputed to have once healed a deaf and mute girl, by blessing some water, and giving it to the girl to drink. Galla remained there for the rest of her life, tending to the sick and poor, before dying in 550, of breast cancer.
A story about St. Galla of Rome, illustrating the importance to not follow the crowd, but to be oneself. Legend says that St. Galla, after becoming a widow, grew a beard to avoid any offers of remarriage.
Not only girls who want to be nuns, but girls who just want to be good have to ignore a marvelous lot of nonsense from those who “follow the pack.” Life will pass you by, they say, and you won’t have any fun if you don’t do as we do! About as fast as St. Galla grew her beard, it will!
One night she saw St. Peter standing before her between two candlesticks and she asked him if her sins were forgiven her. St. Peter nodded and said, “Come, follow me.” But Galla asked if her dear friend Benedicta might come too. Yes, she might, said St. Peter, after thirty days — and that is precisely what happened. St. Galla and another holy woman departed this life for heaven three days later, and Benedicta thirty days after them.
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About the author
Terence Weldon is an openly gay Catholic who blogs at Queering the Church. Originally from South Africa, he is a partnered father and grandfather based in the United Kingdom.
Terence Weldon
This article was originally published on Q Spirit in October 2019 and was most recently checked for accuracy on Oct. 5, 2023.
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This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
So the phrase “dear friend Benedicta” is the sole basis for labeling her the lesbian lover of St. Galla, along with the beard story (which would normally be dismissed as a mere legend unless it’s being used to push an agenda, of course).