A Millennial Journey in Faith: “He who has hope lives differently”

The cause for canonization of a Roman woman born 10 months before me has been opened. The day I married, she was buried. She had died a few days earlier, a year after giving birth to her third child – the child for him she gave her life when she refused the most effective cancer treatment, which would have posed danger to him.  
 
Chiara Corbella Petrillo met her husband, Enrico Petrillo, at age 18, on a pilgrimage. They married six years later and shortly thereafter were overjoyed to learn that their love had resulted in life. They soon discovered that the child, Maria, had a rare genetic abnormality that was incompatible with life. The doctors assumed they would abort her, but for the Petrillos, “the problem of choosing didn’t exist,” as Enrico later said. They welcomed her in love, baptizing her and enveloping her in affection throughout the short minutes she lived after her birth. Her funeral cards reflected her parents’ certainty in the resurrection. They read, “We are born never to die.”
 
Soon, she was pregnant again, a cause for great joy. But, the ultrasound again revealed abnormalities in the baby. As the pregnancy progressed, it became clear that he, too, would die shortly after birth. Again, they welcomed their son, Davide, in love. Chiara wrote, “Davide has overthrown our ‘right’ to want a son who would be for us, because he was only for God.”
 
Through the death of their children, they became aware of eternity in a way few young people are. Chiara embodied the saying of Pope Benedict XVI, “He who has hope lives differently.” She faced the death of her two children with a knowledge of the resurrection. This must have prepared her for what came next: during her third pregnancy, the baby was healthy, but Chiara was not. A lesion on her tongue was found to be cancerous. She accepted the cancer and the postponement of treatments that would put her son, Fransisco, at risk.
 
To those who urged her to undergo treatment during her pregnancy, she laughed and said, “Please don’t make that face. I can accept all of it – the cancer, the pain, death even – but I cannot accept that face.”
 
Enrico explains her strength. He writes that Chiara was not brave. She never raised her hand in school, for example. But, her certainty in Christ and his love for her allowed her to face difficult, even impossible, circumstances – not through her own strength, but through the strength of another.
 
Chiara lived the Easter message: Christ is the resurrection and the life. We can abandon ourselves to him, certain that death is not the end. As I live the Paschal Mystery once again this season, I look to Chiara – my peer in age, but far my superior in holiness – to grow in certainty of our eternal destiny.