Tag: Married Saints

It is hard to imagine the story of St. Gianna not being centered on her life as a wife and mother. She sought with all her heart to live a vocation to love. As she wrote to her husband, Pietro, shortly before they were married: “Love is the most beautiful sentiment the Lord has put into the soul of men and women.”

Love — desiring the good of the other and acting accordingly — was the goal of St. Gianna’s life, and their marriage was an icon of Christian love. Pietro was in St. Peter’s Square for his wife’s 2004 canonization — the first time a man or woman had witnessed the canonization of a spouse.

St. Gianna’s life of love is traced back to her youth, but takes clearer shape in her choice to become a physician.

The Crosiers

Her initial intent with that career path was to offer gynecological services to the poor of Brazil, hoping to join her priest brother there in the missions. This became an impossibility, however, because St. Gianna’s health was delicate and could not withstand the risks associated with such mission work. And so she turned her specialization to pediatrics.

After a four-month courtship and five-month engagement, the Mollas were married in 1955. The publication of the letters exchanged during the future saint and her future husband’s courtship are a testament to the joy available to couples united in a marriage grounded in Christ.

The Mollas modeled an authentic Christian marriage, one where love and joy prevails in the midst of the modern world’s complexities.

By mid-1961 the Mollas, already parents of three children, rejoiced to find out they were expecting a fourth child. But this season of joy became an opportunity for St. Gianna to carry her heaviest cross as a disciple, to heed what Christ described as the greatest act of love — to lay down one’s life for another. Two months into the pregnancy, St. Gianna was diagnosed with a tumor on her uterus.

Doctors believed that in order to treat the tumor she would need to have an abortion or have a hysterectomy. Catholic teaching, of course, forbids direct abortion. However under Catholic morality’s principle of double effect, a hysterectomy could have been performed, even if it indirectly took the life of her child in the womb. St. Gianna chose the path of love — rejecting any method of treatment that endangered the life of the child — and the tumor alone was removed. In this great act of love, St. Gianna showed that a mother’s vocation is to protect life, not end it.

Gianna Beretta with then-fiancé Pietro Molla in 1955. CNS / Catholic Press photo

Gianna was clear to her family and friends about what to do if there was a question of having to give preference to her life or the baby’s. “This time my pregnancy will be difficult, and they will have to save one or the other, and I want them to save the baby,” she said.

On Holy Saturday in 1962, a healthy baby girl was born. But St. Gianna had to give birth by Caesarian section and, with that, an infection had set in. It would claim her life a few days later, on April 28 at age 39. When he canonized St. Gianna in 2004, Pope St. John Paul II recalled how the saint’s own death imitated Christ’s, who “‘having loved his own … loved them to the end’ (Jn 13: 1). … The extreme sacrifice she sealed with her life testifies that only those who have the courage to give of themselves totally to God and to others are able to fulfill themselves.”

Her feast day is April 28.

Michael R. Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic. Follow him on Twitter at @HeinleinMichael.

At times the biographies about St. Louis IX, King of France, make it sound like he had an overbearing mother. And it seems very likely that he did. However, it also seems that the care and formation that his mother provided also is what contributed greatly to his personal holiness.

St. Louis’ mother, Queen Blanche, knew that her young boy would one day become king, and she did all within her power to make sure that he would be prepared as best as possible. She personally saw to it that he was trained in all the things a king-in-waiting should, including Latin, military arts, oration and government. But first and foremost, she raised him to desire holiness above all. She drilled into him: “I love you, my dear son, as much as a mother can love her child; but I would rather see you dead at my feet than that you should ever commit a mortal sin.”

This aversion to sin defined St. Louis’ life and directed his own quest for holiness. He knew that in order to be a good king, husband and father he needed to be a good Christian first. To aid him in this quest he adopted a spirituality that included a strict regimen of mortification and penitence.

As a king, he enacted a series of laws by which he forbade sinful and illicit behavior in his realm. And he reformed the French judicial system to be thoroughly more merciful and just. For those reforms, he is memorialized throughout the world ­— even in the U.S. Capitol and Supreme Court buildings.

All of this adds up to the fact that the saintly king was a pious man marked by charity in thought, word and deed. St. Louis modeled this charity in a very tangible way by his care of and service to the poor and underprivileged. He attended to the construction of institutions for their care and even publicly washed the feet of the poor on Holy Thursdays in imitation of Christ.

In 1234, St. Louis married Princess Margaret of Provence. Their marriage was tested thoroughly, however, by the saint’s meddlesome and overbearing mother who became very jealous of the attention her son gave his wife. Despite the difficulties, their marriage appeared a success, and together they had 11 children.

St. Louis’ reign was marked as a golden age of French culture and prominence on the global stage. A man of courage and action, he also supported the intellectual life of the Church and supported the establishment of a theological school in Paris that would be later known as the Sorbonne. He even was joined once at court by the great St. Thomas Aquinas, a preeminent theologian and philosopher of the day.

A motto in life for St. Louis comes from the mission with which he was entrusted at his coronation: to serve as “God’s lieutenant on Earth.” His life’s highest aim was to give his all for the glory of God and the good of his people. This was evident in leading two of the Crusades, at which time he took possession of a relic of Christ’s crown of thorns. St. Louis built a magnificent chapel in Paris to house the relic. Known as Sainte Chappelle, it remains one of the most visited places in France.

He died in 1270 in Tunisia after contracting dysentery en route to the Holy Land during the eighth Crusade. In his spiritual testament to his eldest son, he passed along the guiding wisdom he learned from his mother years before: “My dearest son, you should permit yourself to be tormented by every kind of martyrdom before you would allow yourself to commit a mortal sin.” St. Louis was canonized in 1295.

Feast day is August 25.

Michael R. Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic. Follow him on Twitter at @HeinleinMichael.

St. Marguerite d’Youville’s early life set the stage, in many ways, for a path that would lead her one day to being called “mother of universal charity” by Pope St. John XXIII.

After her father’s death, her young life existed within the bounds of a poor, fatherless home. Although she would go on to found the Sisters of Charity of Montreal — also known as the Grey Nuns — the young St. Marguerite ruled out religious life after a few years at a boarding school operated by religious women. The experience provided her with a firm education and deepened her faith.

At age 20, St. Marguerite married François d’Youville in 1722. It was by no means an easy marriage. Her husband was frequently traveling for his business, which illegally sold liquor to the Native Americans in Quebec. To make matters worse, she was living with a domineering and harsh mother-in-law, living as if a captive in her own home. It was believed that St. Marguerite’s husband was adulterous on his work-related travels, but she lovingly and dutifully cared for him through his final illness. By age 29, she was a widow, and she experienced the death of four of her six children in infancy.

This was a period of great trial in her life. Throughout it all, though, St. Marguerite acted with the greatest charity and humility. She put herself completely in the hands of God, knowing his plan for her would lead to her fullest joy. They were times that strengthened her faith and relationship with God. Little did she know, this would lead her back to the life of a religious — a life she previously had turned down in her younger years in order to pursue marriage.

The widow operated a small store to provide for her two sons’ education; they both would go on to be ordained priests. During that time, St. Marguerite took a blind woman into her home. She developed a heart for the poor and sick — acutely aware of their needs — and responded to the Gospel mandate to care for the poor. Starting charitable work throughout the city on her own, quickly she was joined by others who desired to join in her work. Together they formed a community that became known as the Sisters of Charity in 1737.

St. Marguerite was a pioneer in many ways. She advocated and fought for the rights of the poor, even when this caused great personal hardship for her. Among the taunts aimed at her out of hatred for her heroic work was that the religious order she founded was sometimes called the “tipsy” or “drunk” nuns because of the stories associated with her deceased husband. The phrase in French — les soeurs grises — can be rendered as “the Grey nuns” as they are still known today.

Eventually called to put order into a Montreal hospital that was disintegrating and in need of dedicated leadership, St. Marguerite laid a foundation for her community’s outreach to untold numbers of the poor and sick throughout Canada in the decades and centuries to follow. After a fire destroyed her hospital a few years before the end of her life, St. Marguerite proceeded with faith and courage to rebuild.

In 1990, St. Marguerite d’Youville became the first native-born Canadian to be canonized a saint. Although mostly remembered for her life and work as a religious foundress and servant of the poor, St. Marguerite is mostly sought after as a patron in a variety of familial situations desiring her intercession: troubled marriages, widows and those with troublesome in-laws.

Her feast day is Oct. 16.

Michael R. Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic. Follow him on Twitter at @HeinleinMichael.

Blessed Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi have the distinction to have been the first married couple jointly beatified by the Church, sharing the same necessary miracle attributed to their intercession. In many ways, their beatification was seen as a fruition of the Second Vatican Council’s desire for all the baptized to understand their call to holiness. As Pope St. John Paul II said in his homily at their 2001 beatification, “Today the aspiration of the Council is fulfilled with the first beatification of a married couple. Their fidelity to the Gospel and their heroic virtues were verified in their life as spouses and parents.”

A childless uncle and his wife requested to raise and adopt Luigi as their own son. Agreed to by Luigi’s parents, he maintained a close relationship with them. In many ways this unique situation helped prepare Luigi for his vocation as a husband and father. Luigi studied law and went on to a distinguished career in civil service.

Maria Corsini was introduced to Luigi through her father, who was a friend of Luigi’s adopted family. Maria was a woman of culture who loved music and was a professor and published writer in the field of education. She was very conscious of care to the poor and needy — on several occasions she volunteered with the Red Cross. During World War II, Maria oversaw the welcome of refugees into the family home and was generous with anyone who came to their door in search of life’s necessities.

Married in 1905, the Quattrocchis had four children — two of whom became priests and one a nun. Their fourth child was born in 1913 after a long and painful pregnancy. The situation had been so dire that Maria’s physicians recommended an abortion, which she and Luigi both resolutely rejected.

Amid the busyness of family life, the holy couple aimed to help each other and their children to answer the call to holiness. Years later, their son, Cesare, said, “There was a kind of race between Father and Mother to grow in spirituality. She began in the ‘pole position’ as she already lived an intense faith experience, while he was certainly ‘a good man, just and honest but not very practicing.’”

Together the Quattrocchis’ holiness grew by attending daily Mass and reciting the Rosary as a family each evening. They regularly took part in retreats and participated in theology courses at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University. Their family participated each month in a Eucharistic vigil associated with the First Fridays devotion, as they were consecrated together as a family to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, who was prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints at the time of their beatification, said that the Quattrocchis “made a true domestic church of their family, which was open to life, to prayer, to the social apostolate, to solidarity with the poor and to friendship.”

The Quattrocchis were visionary in their desire to spread the Gospel in the social sphere. They are counted among the founders and organizers of three apostolates, including Italian associations for Catholic scouting and laity, as well as a charitable organization founded to bring sick and infirm pilgrims to Lourdes and other shrines.

Luigi died in 1951, and Maria died 14 years later in 1965. The legacy they left behind is summed up best in the words of Pope St. John Paul II: “The blessed couple lived an ordinary life in an extraordinary way.”

Their feast day is Nov. 25.

Michael R. Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic. Follow him on Twitter at @HeinleinMichael.