Saint Gianna Beretta Molla

Physician, Wife, and Mother

Feast Day

April 28

Life

1922–1962

Canonized

2004

Born

Magenta, Lombardy, Italy

Gianna Beretta was born in 1922 in Magenta, near Milan, the tenth of thirteen children of a deeply Catholic family. She qualified as a doctor at the University of Pavia in 1949 and opened a pediatric clinic in Mesero. She had also considered missionary medical work in Brazil; her health did not allow it. In 1955 she married Pietro Molla, an engineer; they had three children — Pierluigi, Mariolina, and Laura — between 1956 and 1959.

Early in her fourth pregnancy in September 1961, Gianna was diagnosed with a uterine fibroma. She was offered three medical options: hysterectomy, which would end the pregnancy but save her life; abortion of the fetus, which would preserve the uterus and her life; or surgical removal of the fibroma alone, which would carry the pregnancy to term but risk her own survival. She chose the third without hesitation, telling the surgeon: 'If you must choose between me and the child, do not hesitate. Choose — I demand it — the child. Save him.'

The fibroma was removed, the pregnancy proceeded. On the morning of Holy Saturday, April 21, 1962, she delivered a healthy daughter, Gianna Emanuela. Within days septic peritonitis set in. After a week of intense suffering, refusing morphine that might dull her ability to pray, Gianna died at home on the morning of April 28, 1962. She was thirty-nine years old.

Pope John Paul II beatified her in 1994 with her husband and four children present; she became, with this, the first lay woman beatified together with her surviving spouse. He canonised her on May 16, 2004 in the presence of her husband, three of her children, and her grown daughter Gianna Emanuela, then forty-two years old.