Gianna Beretta Molla

Gianna Beretta Molla was born on 4 October 1922 in Magenta, in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, the tenth of thirteen children of Alberto Beretta and Maria De Micheli. She was raised in a devout Catholic family in which several siblings later entered priestly, religious, or missionary life. After secondary schooling she began medical studies in Milan during the Second World War and received her degree in medicine and surgery from the University of Pavia in 1949. She specialized in pediatrics at the University of Milan in 1952. She opened a medical practice in Mesero, near Magenta, where she treated children, mothers, the elderly, and the poor, often without charge, and combined clinical work with membership in Catholic Action and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul.

In her youth and early professional years she enjoyed mountaineering, skiing, music, and painting. For a time she considered going to Brazil as a physician alongside a missionary brother, but she discerned instead a vocation to marriage and family life. On 24 September 1955 she married the engineer Pietro Molla in the Basilica of Saint Martin in Magenta. The couple settled in Mesero. Three children followed in close succession: Pierluigi in 1956, Maria Zita (called Mariolina) in 1957, and Laura in 1959. Gianna continued to practice medicine while raising her children, regarding professional work, marriage, and motherhood as a single Christian calling rather than competing states of life.

In September 1961, early in her fourth pregnancy, physicians discovered a large fibroma on her uterus. The options presented to her included a hysterectomy, which would have ended the pregnancy, and surgical removal of the fibroma with substantial risk to mother and child. Gianna asked that the life of the unborn child be given precedence. The fibroma was excised and the pregnancy continued. On 21 April 1962 she delivered a daughter, Gianna Emanuela, by Caesarean section at San Gerardo Hospital in Monza. In the days after the birth she developed septic peritonitis. She died on 28 April 1962, at the age of thirty-nine, having repeatedly told those around her that they must save the child. Her husband and four children survived her; Mariolina died of illness in 1964. The youngest daughter later became a physician.

Devotion to Gianna Beretta Molla spread in Italy and abroad, especially among families and medical professionals who saw in her a model of lay holiness and of the defense of unborn life. Her cause of canonization was introduced in the Archdiocese of Milan. Pope John Paul II beatified her on 24 April 1994 and canonized her on 16 May 2004 in Saint Peter's Square. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 28 April. She is invoked as a patron of mothers, physicians, unborn children, pregnant women, and families. She is buried in the cemetery of Mesero in Lombardy, which has become a place of pilgrimage associated with her memory.