Maria Orsola Bussone

Maria Orsola Bussone was born on 2 October 1954 in Vallo Torinese, a small comune in the province of Turin in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. She grew up in a Catholic family in this modest community in the foothills of the Alps. She was not a member of a religious order and remained a lay adolescent living at home. In her early teens she encountered the Focolare Movement (the Work of Mary), the international Catholic lay movement founded by Chiara Lubich, whose spirituality is centered on unity and on living the Gospel in ordinary daily life. Around 1967, when she was about thirteen, she took part in a Focolare gathering and embraced that ideal, seeking to put into practice the movement’s monthly “Word of Life” among family, schoolmates, and other young people.

Those who later testified about her recalled a cheerful, open character and a serious desire to live Christianity with totality rather than as a private devotion. She belonged to the youth expression of the Focolare (often called the “gen”) rather than to a consecrated community of focolarini. Her life was that of an ordinary Italian schoolgirl of the 1960s, combined with a documented effort to make herself one with others and to love God in concrete circumstances. She left personal writings, including diary notes and letters, that later formed part of the memory of her brief spiritual life.

On 10 July 1970, after an outing that included swimming, she suffered a fatal electric shock while using a hairdryer. She died at the age of fifteen in Vallo Torinese. The suddenness of her death, together with the testimony of those who had known her commitment to the Focolare charism, led local Catholics and members of the movement to regard her as a possible model of youthful holiness.

A cause for beatification was later introduced in the Archdiocese of Turin, and in the Catholic Church she is titled Servant of God. She has not been beatified or canonized by the Holy See, and no official feast day or list of patronages has been assigned to her. Her memory is kept especially within the Focolare Movement and in her native Piedmont, where she is remembered as a teenager who tried to live the Gospel with simplicity in the few years given to her.