Gianna Beretta was born on October 4, 1922 in Magenta, Italy, the tenth of thirteen children. Of those thirteen, five children died young and three entered religious life.

In her childhood, Gianna received a priceless gift—a solid Catholic upbringing in a loving home. This gave her, from her earliest youth, a conviction of the necessity of prayer and a great trust in Divine Providence, and it enabled her to understand the meaning of suffering when lived out of love.

Gianna experienced life as a marvelous gift form God.

A spiritual retreat when she was fifteen, marked a “great leap” in her life, and she received a deeper awareness of the importance of living to the full a life in God’s grace.

She made two resolutions, which she kept from then on: “I would rather die than commit a mortal sin,” and “I want to do everything for Jesus. Each of my works, every misfortune, I offer to Jesus.”

Gianna was no stranger to suffering. As a child, she lost three of her siblings during the Spanish Influenza epidemic and as a teenager, an especially beloved older sister. When she was twenty, within four months of each other, both of her parents died.

But throughout her life, Gianna was known to be a serene and joyful person, someone who loved life. She loved nature and flowers and was an avid mountain climber and skier. She also loved painting and music, and played the piano.

During her years of secondary and university education, she balanced studies with generous service, dedicating her time and attention to the elderly and needy as a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and to youth in Catholic Action.

Wanting to help people, she entered medical school. Then upon her graduation in 1949, she began a medical practice in Magenta, and patients thronged to her office. In addition to this, she continued to be involved in programs for social improvement and in Catholic Action.

From her mother she had inherited the ability to inspire young people for the Catholic faith. She often gave lectures and organized retreat days and spiritual exercises, social evenings, excursions, and hikes for Catholic youth groups.

After a time, she was no longer content with her medical practice. She wanted to become a medical missionary in Brazil, where two of her brothers were serving—one as a priest and the other as a civil engineer.

Meanwhile, however, she was getting to know a young man who thought just as she did—an engineer, Pietro Molla. Was God calling her to marriage?

As a medical missionary in Brazil, she could help many people physically and spiritually and, together with her brother priest, lead them to God. As a Christian wife and mother, on the other hand, she would be able to hand on the gift of life to children and bring them up to love and praise God. What did God want her to do?

She prayed a lot during this time, and asked her friends and siblings to pray for her.

Her confessor was wise enough not to give her any direct advice. He did say, however, “If all good Catholic girls went into the convent, where would we get our Christian mothers?”
Then, on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, she received an inner light: her vocation was marriage. In February 1955, when Gianna was 32 years old, she and Pietro married.

When they moved into their new home, they made the family consecration to the Sacred Heart and promised to recite the rosary together daily. And this they did even when they had to travel abroad together, which the husband often had to do for business reasons.

Gianna continued her medical practice and her volunteer activities. Their first child, a boy, was born in 1956, followed in 1957 and ’59 by two girls. All three pregnancies had complications. These complications made Gianna even more thankful to God for these precious gifts.

Whether it was with her family or her patients, Gianna, day to day, continued to pour out her life in loving service.

In July 1961, she again became pregnant. Two months later, she was diagnosed with a life-threatening uterine tumor which required immediate surgery. She was given three options:

The removal of both the tumor and the uterus (which would certainly save her own life), a therapeutic abortion and the removal of the tumor (which would both save her life and enable her to have more children), or the removal of the tumor only.

Though Gianna fully knew that the third option was extremely risky to her own life, she chose it in order to save her unborn child. And she entrusted herself totally into God’s hands.

The operation was “successful” and the life of the child was spared. Gianna spent the remaining seven months until her baby’s birth strong in spirit and unrelenting in her dedication to her tasks as mother and doctor. But she was well aware that her danger was not over. She knew that giving birth after that kind of surgery could be very dangerous.

A few days before the baby was due, Gianna told her husband with a firm voice and inspired look: “If you must decide between me and the child, do not hesitate: choose the child. I insist on it. Save the baby.”

On Good Friday, April 20, 1962, Gianna entered the hospital. The following day, Holy Saturday, a strong, healthy baby girl was born. They named her Gianna Emanuela.

A few hours after her child’s birth, Gianna began to experience severe pain. She had developed septic peritonitis. The doctors did everything they could to ease her suffering and save her life, but to no avail. She died a week later on April 28, 1962. Until her last breath, she kept repeating, “Jesus, I love you! Jesus, I love you!”

Gianna Beretta Molla was beatified on April 24, 1994, during the International year of the Family. But she was not only beatified for her heroic sacrifice. In fact, that decision flowed from the way she had always lived her life.

“My wife had infinite faith in God,” Pietro said shortly before the beatification, “but I never realized I was living with a saint…. She seemed to me to be a completely ordinary woman, but as Archbishop Columbo said when speaking about her, ‘holiness does not consist in extraordinary signs. Above all, it consists in the daily acceptance of the unfathomable designs of God.’”

Ten years later, on May 16, 2004, Gianna was canonized.

Present at the canonization, along with Pietro and the rest of the family, was Gianna Emanuela, the child for whom the saint had given her life. Gianna Emanuela, then 42 years old, is a medical doctor.

At her canonization, Pope John Paul II said, “Following the example of Christ, who having loved his own… loved them to the end (Jn 13:1), this holy mother of a family remained heroically faithful to the commitment she made on the day of her marriage.

“Through the example of Gianna Beretta Molla, may our age rediscover the pure, chaste, and fruitful beauty of conjugal love, lived as a response to the divine call!”