ORLANDO | Servant of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and Mary Sister Gianna Grace Perino will tell you her mother knew she was going to be a nun since she was five years old. She often took couch arm guards, placed one on her and another on her brother Frank’s head, and together they walked around the house with hands folded, singing and praying. It was the start of a beautiful journey of God’s graces revealed to a little girl, now about to profess perpetual vows, Dec. 12, 2025.
“When I reflect back on my vocation story and my life as a religious, there’s just so much joy,” said Sister Gianna Grace.
Growing up in Catholic schools she said she “never disbelieved” anything her teachers taught her. “I always grew up knowing that I was special to the Lord, and I felt that in my heart. I knew it, and I knew it was true because I had experienced God’s love in just so many ways,” she recalled. That goes for the love of Our Lady too. Both were special to her, and she knew she was special to them.
She explained how having that sense put “an overall scope of goodness and joy in life and a sense of hope and beauty.” Loving nature and the outdoors, she always felt it was an extension of His house. “I was always in His presence, experiencing His creation, so I never felt like I was ever away from Him,” she noted. This beautiful sense of being a child of God was something she realized the nuns must experience.
Their love of God was revealed through the teaching of the prayers, but also how to pray and “what to do with that.”
As a senior in high school in Peoria, Ill., she attended a Teens Encounter Christ retreat that changed her life. Although she knew what she describes as “textbook Jesus” – who He was, the Bible stories and Gospels, on the retreat she “actually met Him.” There she discovered He wanted a personal relationship with her, that she might know His heart.
On the retreat she also made new friends who shared her love of God. It was different than the friends from the athletic teams in which she participated. “(The retreat friends) made me feel more like me than any other thing I had ever done because they just accepted me for whoever. And because we had that key element of faith and the relationship with the Lord at the center of our relationship, that was really very new for me. That was transformational,” she said. And she liked the person she was when with them noting, “I didn’t have to be anything else. I didn’t have to achieve anything. I didn’t have to score any goals. They didn’t expect me to be anything other than a beloved daughter of the Father.”
The summer before her sophomore year she decided to change her old friend group. It was painful, but despite the loss, she said there was a greater gain and so many graces. She remains in touch with her retreat friends, many of which have become religious, clergy and others who live “beautiful Catholic marriages.”
In another moment of surrender, she changed majors, from medicine to secondary education and English. “I let the Lord change my mind, and I let His will reign in the throne of my heart,” she recalled. Instead of expected misery, she found incredible joy.
One summer night during her sophomore year, she drove out to a little country church about 15 minutes outside her hometown. It was late, but she loved going there to pray. It was peaceful and in the woods. The church had a grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes furnished with an array of rocks hand picked by local farmers. She talked to the Lord in the stillness and the silence, then prayed a rosary. Feeling restless inside, she asked Mary what her Son wanted from her. “You’re a girl. Help me figure this out,” she queried.
Then she heard the Lord say very clearly, “I want you. I want your whole heart. I want all of you.” Instantly there came peace, and relief of the internal stress she held. Then she looked up into the sky and saw it strewn with stars. “Diamonds in the sky. That was my proposal,” she thought.
Over the years she contemplated becoming Franciscan. Born on the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi and having had Franciscan sisters for teachers, it seemed possible. After all, she loved the outdoors, the cross, the Nativity. It made sense. But she did not find her “family” there. So, she relinquished control of her search and waited patiently, teaching, paying bills, and living as holy a life as she could, attentive to His movements in her life.
Years passed until one day, the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and Mary walked into the school where she taught. “The first instant I saw them, something deep clicked in my heart. I recognized Our Lady in the habit they were wearing, and that was that. That’s how I would always look. I knew that Our Lady would place that in my heart, and she did,” she said. Because it was her job to welcome the new teachers, she got to know them. They learned about her too, inviting her to play guitar at Mass – yet another sign. Sister Gianna Grace recalled, “When I played my first Mass with them, again, something deep clicked in my heart and it was like, oh, there’s no learning curve here. It was a seamless movement of prayer and praise.”
She likened her patient waiting to the waiting of Jesus’s birth during Advent. “It’s not like an emptiness of waiting. There’s waiting with expectation. And that’s where I was in my vocational journey. I was waiting with expectation, because the Lord is a Lord of promises, and He always fulfills His promises.
“There’s a beautiful sense that when the Lord calls you, He’s never going to stop calling. Our response is very important. The Lord gives us so much freedom in our path to holiness,” she said.
She entered postulancy in 2016, on the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. For the past nine years, she has grown in her love for Christ and the Blessed Mother, while serving in the Diocese of Orlando as assistant vocations director, sharing with her fellow Sisters in their school ministries and loving every minute of it.
Professing her fiat forever at her first vows, on the day of her Perpetual Profession, she will deepen her “yes”. She looks forward to kneeling down in front of the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and Mary’s mother foundress, Mother Adela Galindo, “and calling upon the intercession of all the holy men and women, all the saints in heaven, knowing that the doors of heaven are swinging wide open,” she said.
She recognizes the unusual grace it is to be professed before the founder of her order. “To be a part of the foundational generation that knows Mother personally and she knows us, it is the treasure of my life,” she said. Knowing Mother Galindo “transmits the charism directly received from the Holy Spirit” to them she added, “It’s a great responsibility, but such an incredible, incredible gift.” As it has been her entire life, she credits it as “an outpouring of grace” to be responsible to “continue transmitting that (charism) as closely and as accurately and as faithfully as possible.”
To view Sister Gianna Grace’s Dec. 12 perpetual vows via livestream from St. Mary’s Cathedral in Miami at 6:30 p.m., visit https://www.youtube.com/@SCTJM-TV/streams.
By Glenda Meekins of the Florida Catholic staff, December 11, 2025