Feast day: April 28
St. Gianna Beretta Molla
An Italian pediatrician, wife, and mother who, when a tumor threatened her pregnancy, refused treatment that would harm her child and died days after the birth.
Gianna Beretta was born in 1922 near Milan, the tenth of thirteen children in a devout Italian family. Bright, joyful, and active, she loved skiing and mountaineering, painting and music, and after years of study became a physician, opening a medical practice and specializing in pediatrics. Hers was a thoroughly modern life — a professional woman of deep faith who saw her medicine as a way of serving God in the sick.
She married an engineer, Pietro Molla, in 1955, and the two built a happy home; three children were born to them, along with the ordinary joys and griefs of family life, including miscarriages she felt keenly. She continued her medical work and her devotion to her patients, especially mothers and children, finding holiness not in extraordinary deeds but in the faithful love of an everyday vocation.
During her fourth pregnancy, in 1961, doctors discovered a tumor in her womb. She faced a choice: an operation that would save her life but end her child's, or a riskier course that might save the baby while endangering herself. As both a mother and a doctor she chose her child, instructing the physicians, if it ever came to a choice during the birth, to save the baby.
Her daughter, Gianna Emanuela, was born healthy in April 1962; but Gianna herself developed an infection and died a week later, at thirty-nine, offering her life for her child. She was canonized in 2004 with her husband and children present — a saint of the ordinary married and working life, and a patron of mothers, physicians, and the unborn.
A modern working mother and doctor, she chose her unborn daughter's life over her own — and was canonized in 2004 with that daughter present.
“Love and sacrifice are closely linked, like the sun and the light.”
— St. Gianna Beretta Molla
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