In case you didn’t know, Blessed Gianna Molla will be one of the six blesseds canonized on Sunday.
Here’s a piece by a priest in the Globe and Mail on her life
In various parts of the world, the media and others are having a hey day in debunking and politicizing the Gianna story, stating that her canonization is the Roman Catholic Church’s full frontal attack on pro-choice people and all who support abortion. To reduce her life and vocation to “the first anti-abortion saint” is to misread her powerful story. The church doesn’t beatify or canonize people and use them as arrows or weapons to attack others for error and sin.
Rather, the church offers the lives of outstanding women and men such as Gianna to present an alternative gospel vision to what we are enduring in the world today. Saints offer us a way to put the Beatitudes into practice on a daily basis. They are models who inspire and guide us.
….What is even more unique about her story is that on Sunday, her husband, Pietro, and three of the four children (the third daughter died in childhood) will be sitting in the front rows to witness an extraordinary moment in their family and in the life of their church. In an age when permanent commitment is widely discouraged, when human life is cheap and disposable and family life is under siege, when abortion is all too available, when sacrifice and virtue are absent in so many lives; when, I would argue, many in the medical profession have little concern for the dignity and sacredness of every human life; when suffering is seen as a nuisance without any redemptive meaning; when goodness, joy, simplicity and beauty are suspect; Gianna Beretta Molla shows this world, gripped by a culture of death, an alternative gospel way of compelling beauty.
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