St. Gabriel Possenti sketch

Just a quick sketch from a photograph; I want to get familiar with his likeness because of many pictures I want to make of him, including a very big project I hope to do someday.

St. Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows is awesome. (A bit of a rant follows)

I don't understand why people, even faithful Catholics, are so eager to try to disprove the gun and lizard legend. Do we go around trying to disprove the legend of St. George and the dragon? Why can't we accept it for what it is- a legend? I suspect the reason is pacifism. But the Catholic Church has never taught pacifism.

St. Gabriel encountered a soldier about to rape a girl. Should he have just tried to talk the soldier out of it? No one could possibly think that would work, and thus to do so would have been refusing to save the girl when he could have saved her, and would be wrong. What he did do, to grab the soldier's gun and march him and his fellows out of town at the end of its barrel, saved the girl and was right.

I believe in the legend most of all because it is purity, blazing purity, confronting debauchery and, pardon my slang, pwning it. The soldiers mocked Gabriel because he was a monk- a virgin. But he took their guns and blasted a crawling reptile in one shot, and they were cowed. His true manhood conquered their bestialness. Purity is not a constrained, repressed, lifeless thing. It blazes like the sun, and it pwns.