ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN APRIL
Saints celebrated on the 28th of April
SAINT GIANNA BERETTA MOLLA, MOTHER
On April 24, 1994, Pope John Paul II declared “blessed” a present-day Italian woman physician who accepted death rather than undergo an operation that would imperil the life of her unborn child. In beatifying this contemporary pro-life heroine, the Holy Father gave to the world a saintly intercessor against the international cruelty of abortion.
BEGINNINGS
Gianna Beretta was born in Magenta, Italy, on October 4, 1922. She was the tenth of the 13 offspring of admirable parents, who gave to their children a strong sense of prayer and trust in God’s providence.
Gianna, a highly talented young woman, called, as she felt, to the medical profession, won doctoral degrees in medicine and surgery in 1949 at the University of Pavia. The following year she opened a clinic at Mesero, near Magenta. Two years later she took advanced studies in paediatrics at the University of Milan. Thereafter, Dr Beretta specialised in the care of mothers and babies and also the elderly and the poor.
GENEROUS SERVICE
Gianna undertook the medical profession not simply as a means of support, or even as simply a philanthropy. For her the practice of medicine was a spiritual “mission”. All during her student years she had carried out voluntary service to the needy and aged as a member of the St Vincent de Paul Society. As a physician she increased her generous service as a form of “Catholic Action”: lay volunteerism according to the mind and needs of the Church. But there was nothing of the “fanatic” about Dr Beretta. She was a young woman of vigour and good cheer, a daring skier and mountain climber.
MARRIED LIFE
Marriage in 1955 merely gave Dr Gianna a chance to expand her “missionary” efforts. Gianna and Pietro Molla were a joyful couple. She bore him three children in the next four years. A woman of balance and common sense, she successfully harmonised her careers of mother, wife, and medic.
A DECISION
However, when she became pregnant again in 1961, the doctor suddenly learned that a fibroma was developing in her womb. The baby was now in its second month.
Scientist and paediatrician as she was, Dr Molla appreciated the threat that the growing tumour presented to her life if she did not undergo an operation. But the uterine operation would have meant death for the unborn baby.
It was a classic case that the Church has always pondered. Moral theology, although forbidding direct abortion, has taught that while surgeons should try to save both mother and child, it is permissible to remove a diseased womb to save the mother, even though the child is thus deprived of life.
A BLESSED CHILD
Gianna at once pleaded with the surgeon to save the life of the child. During the next seven months she forced herself to keep busy with her various duties, meanwhile praying as never before that God would preserve the little one. She added a special prayer that the child itself would suffer no pain from the malignancy. A few days before the birth was due, Gianna told her doctors, “If you must decide between me and the child, do not hesitate; choose the child. I insist on it. Save the baby.”
The baby, Gianna Emanuela Molla, was born in good health on April 21, 1962. But despite every effort to save Dr Molla, who bore her unspeakable pain in constant prayer, she died on April 28. A sad end, but a glorious one: is not a mother’s love essentially a vocation of self-giving?
At the beatification ceremony, the Holy Father greeted and blessed at his throne those whom the heroic paediatrician had left behind in God’s good hands: her husband Pietro, one of their older children, and Gianna Emanuela Molla, just turned 22. The Pope blessed the young woman, but Gianna Molla knew she had already been blessed from conception by the hand of God.
Note: Gianna Beretta Molla was canonised on May 16, 2004.
(This article by Fr Robert McNamara was published in the “Divine Mercy Newsletter”, paper edition, 2011, Vol. 61)
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