Saint Gianna Beretta Molla (1922-1962)

Key dates

A big, faith-filled family in Magenta

Giovanna Francesca Beretta is born on 4 October 1922 at Magenta, a small town on the Lombard plain west of Milan, and is baptized on 11 October in the basilica of San Martino^[1]. She is the tenth of thirteen children of Alberto Beretta and Maria De Micheli, a couple of Franciscan tertiaries for whom faith is not a backdrop but the centre of domestic life^[2]. Settled in Bergamo from the age of three, it is there that she grows up^[3]. From these siblings will come several religious vocations, including her brother Giuseppe, a missionary priest in Brazil: Gianna’s holiness is not a solitary flash, it grows from family soil^[4].

The upbringing she receives at home is made of daily Mass, the rosary and concrete charity. Gianna makes her First Communion at the age of five, in 1928, and grows up in a climate where praying and serving go hand in hand^[5]. The loss of both her parents in 1942, a few months apart, marks her in her youth, without denting either her faith or her joy: witnesses and those close to her describe a well-balanced, cheerful girl, fond of the mountains, skiing and music as much as of prayer^[6].

Medicine as a vocation, not just a profession

Gianna undertakes medical studies at Milan and then Pavia, where she earns her doctorate in medicine and surgery on 30 November 1949^[7]. From 1950 she opens a practice at Mesero, near Magenta, and completes her training with a specialization in pediatrics at the University of Milan, obtained on 7 July 1952^[8]. She considers for a time joining her missionary brother in Brazil as a doctor, but fragile health prevents her^[9]. In 1952, the very year of her specialization, she travels to Lourdes, where she is listed among the physicians registered with the Bureau of Medical Observations, the body that examines reported cures^[10].

For Gianna, medicine is not merely a skill: it is a ministry of charity. She cares with particular attention for mothers, newborns, the elderly and the destitute, seeing in each patient a presence of Christ^[11]. According to the biographies that quote her notes, she saw in the sick body a place where God himself must let himself be seen by the world: to heal was for her a ministry of charity, not a mere profession.

Discerning her vocation

Gianna became famous for her limpid way of speaking about the discernment of one’s state of life. According to the accounts of those close to her — her brother being a missionary priest — she recalled that a vocation is a gift of God whose will must be patiently discerned, without forcing doors, and that this docility then illuminates her whole choice as wife and mother.

This spirituality of “as God wills” is anything but abstract. It prepares, unknowingly, the decision that will seal her life: to receive what happens, even the tragic, as part of the divine will, and to answer it with love rather than calculation^[12].

Meeting Pietro Molla

In December 1954, Gianna meets Pietro Molla, an engineer and manager of a factory in the region^[13]. The engagement is announced on 11 April 1955; the marriage is celebrated on 24 September 1955 in the basilica of San Martino at Magenta, the very place where she had been baptized^[14]. The correspondence exchanged before the wedding reveals a woman who expects from marriage not comfort, but a path of holiness for two. A few days before the ceremony, she writes to her future husband a sentence that John Paul II will quote at the canonization:

“Love is the most beautiful sentiment the Lord has placed in the souls of men.” — Gianna Beretta Molla, letter to Pietro Molla, September 1955^[15]

A Christian home in the ordinary world

Gianna gives up neither her profession nor her life as a mother: she keeps practising medicine while raising her children. Pierluigi is born in November 1956, Mariolina in December 1957, Laura in July 1959^[16]. The Molla home is an ordinary one — work, children, holidays in the mountains, parish life — but inhabited by a constant supernatural intention. Gianna wanted, according to her biographers, to do everything for Jesus, and saw holiness not in the extraordinary but in daily duty accomplished out of love.

It is precisely this holiness of the lay and conjugal state that the Church wished to highlight in canonizing her: not a nun, not an extraordinary mystic, but a married woman, a physician, a mother, whose ordinary life was crossed through and through by grace^[17].

The fibroid and the three options

In September 1961, when she is two months pregnant with her fourth child, doctors discover a uterine fibroid that gravely threatens her health^[18]. Three medical courses of action present themselves to her. The gravity of the choice lies in the fact that two of them would have removed the danger for the mother — but at the cost of the child’s life.

The table below summarizes the three possibilities as the reference sources and the biography of the Holy See report them.

Gianna opts for the removal of the fibroid alone, an operation that preserves the pregnancy but leaves the gravest risk upon herself^[19]. Before the operation, she gives the surgeon an instruction that the official biography of the Holy See has preserved:

“If you must choose between me and the child, do not hesitate: choose the child — I insist. Save him.” — Gianna Beretta Molla, September 1961^[20]

“Save the child”

Far from a gesture of despair, Gianna’s choice is the application, in an extreme situation, of her lifelong conviction: the child’s life is not negotiable, and true love goes as far as total gift. During the months that follow, she carries her pregnancy in full lucidity about the danger, while continuing her work and family life as far as possible^[21]. As childbirth approaches, she repeats her decision to those around her: if a choice must be made, it is the child who must be saved^[22].

The birth of Gianna Emanuela, and death

On the morning of 21 April 1962, Holy Saturday, Gianna is taken to the hospital at Monza, where her fourth child, Gianna Emanuela, is born by caesarean section, in perfect health^[23]. But septic peritonitis sets in. Despite the care given, Gianna suffers intensely for a week. She dies on the morning of 28 April 1962, aged thirty-nine. The biography of the Holy See records her last words:

“Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I love you.” — Gianna Beretta Molla, 28 April 1962^[24]

Her daughter Gianna Emanuela, whose life was saved by this sacrifice, herself became a physician — a geriatrician — and the first living witness of her mother’s holiness, present at the beatification as at the canonization^[25].

Gianna would be betrayed if her life were reduced to her final choice. What makes that choice possible is a spirituality of Christian joy patiently cultivated, made of love of God, service of neighbour and abandonment to the divine will. Hers is the holiness of an active, happy woman, not of a tragic heroine.

“Everything for Jesus”: the holiness of everyday life

According to the biographies that report her words, she confided that she found happiness not in great things, but in the grateful welcome of each moment as a gift of God’s goodness.

This way of sanctifying everyday life — profession, home, patients, children — joins the great intuition of lay holiness carried by other contemporary figures, from Saint Josemaría Escrivá to Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati: no life is too ordinary to become holy^[26].

Love and sacrifice, inseparable

According to the testimonies gathered by her biographers, she said, well before 1962, that love is inseparable from sacrifice as light is from the sun — a bond her own death would illustrate to the very end.

It is this lived doctrine that makes it possible to understand her act not as a heroic suicide, but as the crowning of a life of gift. The Church does not canonize her for having sought death, but for having loved life to the end — that of her child and her own, both entrusted into God’s hands^[27].

The cause and the heroic virtues

Gianna’s reputation for holiness spreads quickly in the Magenta region and well beyond. The cause for beatification is opened on 6 November 1972, under the pontificate of Paul VI^[28]. As early as 1973, Pope Paul VI publicly evokes, during an Angelus, “a mother of the diocese of Milan who, to give life to her child, sacrifices her own by a deliberate immolation”^[29] — a passage biographers attribute to Gianna. She is declared Venerable on 6 July 1991, after the recognition of the heroicity of her virtues^[30].

Two Brazilian miracles

Remarkably, the two miracles retained for her beatification and then her canonization both concern Brazil, and both imperilled maternities — a coherence many have read as a sign from Heaven matching Gianna’s very cause: the defence of nascent life.

The table below presents the two healings recognized by the Church as miraculous through Gianna’s intercession.

The first case is the beatification dossier. Lucia Silva Cirilo, a twenty-eight-year-old young Protestant woman, has just given birth for the fourth time at the Saint Francis of Assisi hospital in Grajaú (Maranhão), founded by Gianna’s missionary brother: the child, a baby girl, is stillborn, and a recto-vaginal fistula “about the size of a finger” has opened, followed by life-threatening septicemia. The hospital is not equipped for so delicate an operation, and transfer to São Luís, four hundred kilometres away, risks killing the patient on the way. During the night of 8 to 9 November 1977, three nursing nuns pray before a small photograph of Gianna; in the morning, around nine o’clock, the doctors note with stupor that the fistula has vanished, leaving “a perfectly clean and healthy scar”, and that every trace of infection has disappeared^[31]. Seized of the dossier in 1986, the consulta medica unanimously recognizes the instantaneous, radical and definitive character of the healing; John Paul II signs the decree on the miracle on 21 December 1992^[32].

In the second case — that of the canonization — the premature rupture of the membranes at sixteen weeks, with total loss of amniotic fluid, made, according to ordinary medicine, any favourable outcome unthinkable. Yet the consulta medica concludes on 10 April 2003, unanimously, that the favourable course of the pregnancy was rapid, complete, lasting and inexplicable, and the child was born without after-effects after the mother had implored Gianna’s intercession^[33]. The decree on the miracle is promulgated on 20 December 2003^[34].

A unique canonization

Gianna is beatified on 24 April 1994 and then canonized on 16 May 2004, both times by Saint John Paul II, in Saint Peter’s Square^[35]. The canonization is an unprecedented event: for the first time, a husband attends the canonization of his own wife. Pietro Molla, then over ninety years old, is present with their children — including Gianna Emanuela, the child who was saved^[36]. In his homily, John Paul II sums up the meaning of this life:

“Gianna Beretta Molla was a simple messenger of divine love, but she was so in a deeply significant way. [...] The extreme sacrifice that sealed her life testifies that only those who have the courage to give themselves totally to God and to their brothers and sisters fulfil themselves.” — John Paul II, canonization homily, 16 May 2004^[37]

Saint Gianna Beretta Molla is today invoked as patroness of mothers, physicians, spouses, families and unborn children^[38]. Her liturgical feast is set on 28 April, the day of her death. Clinics, maternity wards, medical centres and family associations bear her name across the world, and she has become a major reference of Catholic thought on the dignity of human life from conception and on the holiness of marriage.

Her radiance lies in the fact that she speaks to ordinary Christians: a woman who worked, loved her husband, raised her children, went skiing, and who made her whole life — not only her death — an offering. This is what John Paul II underlined: “May our age rediscover, through the example of Gianna Beretta Molla, the pure, chaste and fruitful beauty of conjugal love, lived as a response to the divine call!”^[39].

• Saint John Paul II — the pope who beatified and canonized her, a great promoter of the dignity of life and the family.
• Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati and Saint Josemaría Escrivá — other great figures of lay holiness in the heart of the world.
• Saint Carlo Acutis — another contemporary saint whose ordinary life was inhabited by grace.