One cannot love without suffering or suffer without loving.
Look at the mothers who truly love their children: how many sacrifices they make for them. They are ready for everything, even to give their own blood so that their babies grow up good, healthy and strong.
— St. Gianna Beretta Molla
Today is my birthday, and I am thirty-three. I share my birthday with many notable figures. But, today I learned that my birthday is also the feast day of St. Gianna Beretta Molla, an Italian wife, mother, and doctor who discovered in the second month of her pregnancy that she had a uterine fibroma but refused surgical interventions in order that she might carry her child to term. She successfully delivered her full-term baby daughter, Gianna Emanuela, but died seven days later on April 28, 1962. Although I am not a Catholic, I do place an enormous value on motherhood and I strongly identify with the all-powerful love for one’s children that St. Gianna embodied; I am honored to share my birthday with the feast of St. Gianna Molla.
You can learn more about St. Gianna Molla here.
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happy birthday! and thanks for sharing st. gianna molla’s story and quotes, that’s so beautiful and so true about us, mothers 🙂
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Thank you so much, Lu! I can only hope to be half the mother that St. Gianna Molla was, but she certainly provides a wonderful model to follow.