Doctor of Maternal Love

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - May 16, 2008

On Sunday we celebrated Mother's Day. It was a day for all of us to remember the inestimable gift of our mothers and of the importance of motherhood in a culture in which it so often held up to disparagement by radical feminists. There's a clearly a need for new witnesses to the beauty of motherhood, which is meant by God to be a school of love and a path to holiness. Four years ago today, Pope John Paul II canonized someone who is one of the great modern examples of maternal love.

Gianna Beretta was born in 1922. She became a pediatrician and planned to dedicate her life to sick children, but at 33, she met and fell in love with a good Catholic engineer named Pietro Molla, whom she married after a year's courtship. They sought to live the life of an ordinary Christian couple, combining their careers with their duties to their family. In the first five years of their marriage, God blessed them with three children.

During the summer of 1961, they discovered that God had blessed them with a fourth. Two months into her pregnancy, however, Dr. Molla started to feel abdominal pain. She went to see her brother who was an obstetrician, who with his colleagues discovered she had large malignant fibroma in her uterus that was risking her life and the life of her child. One of her brother's colleagues presented her the options: The first was a complete hysterectomy, which would save her own life but take the life of her child; the second was to abort the child and then try to excise the tumor while saving the uterus, so that she could have other children; the third was by far the riskiest: to try to extract the tumor alone, conscious that the post-surgical sutures could rupture the uterus later and lead to the death both of mother and child.

Without hesitation, Gianna resolutely chose the third option, which was the only one that had any chance of saving her child's life.

While she was being prepared for surgery, she insisted with her surgeon to do whatever he needed to do to save the baby's life, even at the loss of her own. The surgery was as successful as it could be. They got the tumor and the child didn't miscarry, but both were still at risk.

Gianna went on with her life joyfully trusting in the Lord. She kept repeating to worried family members, "Whatever God wants." She wrote to a friend: "I have prayed so much in these days. With faith and hope I have entrusted myself to the Lord... I trust in God, yes; but now it is up to me to fulfill my duty as a mother. I renew to the Lord the offer of my life. I am ready for everything, to save my baby."

On Good Friday, April 20, 1962, she entered the hospital to deliver her fourth child. She told the medical team, many of whom knew and loved her as a colleague: "If you must choose between me and the baby, have no hesitation: choose — and I demand it — the baby, save him!"

A healthy little girl was delivered, whom she and Pietro named Giannina, or "little Gianna." Giannina was placed in her delighted mother's arms. But very soon Gianna's post-partum pains and temperature increased. She was diagnosed with septic peritonitis. The doctors did everything they could do — antibiotics, blood transfusions, injections — but nothing helped. Throughout her agony, she kept saying, "Jesus, I love you. Jesus I love you," until she fell into a coma. A week later, on April 28th, she died.

"No one has any greater love," Jesus said in the Gospel, "than to lay down his life for his friends." Dr. Gianna Molla showed in human, very modern terms, what that love really means. When it came to saving her life or saving her child's, she chose her child's. She was willing to sacrifice everything — her career, her family, her very life — for the sake of the gift growing within her.

In a love letter to her after her death, her husband Pietro summarized what this type of self-giving love meant:

"You made your sacrifice for the sake of love, because of your sense of maternal responsibility, because of the supreme respect you had for the child in your womb … as a gift from God… You loved our three precious children no less than you loved the baby in your womb. For all those months you prayed to the Lord, to Our Lady, and to your own mother that the right and guarantee to life for the baby in your womb might not require the sacrifice of your life, and that you would be spared for the sake of our children and our family. At the same time, if the Lord's will were different, if it were not possible to save both lives, you explicitly asked me to make sure the child's life be saved. With your decision, you offered the holocaust of your life. And you offered it with the anguish of a wife and a mother who must leave behind her children and family and everything dear that God had given you… You knew that your maternal obligation to raise, educate and form our children was no less serious than the duty to safeguard their coming into the world after their conception. You knew very well that no one could equal your maternal love in raising, educating and forming our children, but in your humility, you trusted that the Lord would make up for the absence of your visible presence."

When Dr. Gianna Molla received an even more prestigious prefix four years ago in St. Peter's Square, not only was her husband present but also Giannina, the daughter whose life she saved by risking her own.

They were joined by Elizabeth Comparini and her young baby. Two years before, Elizabeth had sustained a tear in the placenta, losing all the amniotic fluid, when her developing child was 16 weeks old. The doctors said there was no chance of survival. Intrepidly, however, Elizabeth refused to have an abortion and prayed to St. Gianna. Through a miracle that led to Gianna's canonization, Elizabeth delivered a healthy baby at 40 weeks by Caesarean section.

For obvious reasons, she has become a special intercessor for women in difficult pregnancies and a patroness of the pro-life movement. For all, she remains a heroic icon of maternal love.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.