Our baby has a name!

Our daughter’s name is
GIANNA ELIZABETH

after St. Gianna Beretta Molla and St. Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist. 

GIANNA: Gianna Beretta Molla, born in 1922, was a doctor, a wife, and a mother of 4. She was heavily involved with such charitable organizations as St. Vincent de Paul Society and Catholic Action, with particular concern for the youth and elderly. She also loved the outdoors and hiked and skied often, and had a generally “joie de vivre” that people admired about her. 

If you know only these things about St. Gianna, her life seems fairly ordinary, albeit very busy and filled with service to others and the Church. But St. Gianna’s life was anything but simple and ordinary. 

In the ordinariness of daily life, Gianna personified heroic virtue, the genuine holiness of life, selflessness, and quiet joy. She was a living example of surrendering to God’s will and personal vocation. It was her daily sacrifice of self that prepared her for her 4^th child’s birth in 1962. 

During this pregnancy, doctors found a fibroma in her uterus, a condition that could only be “fully” remedied by a procedure that would end the baby’s life. Gianna continued her pregnancy after having only a minor procedure instead and trusted in God’s Providence. After 7 more months of excruciating pain, when it came time for her to deliver her daughter, she told the doctors “If you must decide between me and the child, do not hesitate: choose the child - I insist on it. Save her”. Despite the doctors’ efforts to save them both, Gianna died a week after her daughter was born at age 39. While in pain and increasing weakness, her last words were “Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I love you. ”

By naming our daughter Gianna, we’re in no way praying that she too will suffer a tragic death like St. Gianna did. Rather, we want her to have St. Gianna as a role model of the joy of Christian life and the epitome of womanhood—she literally did it all—a life of service, a mother, wife, and doctor. We want our Gianna to know that she too can do anything she is called to do, as long as she is following the will of God. We want her to know that heroic sacrifice can be small, like surrendering daily your own will to God’s, or large, like putting another's life before your own. 

Gianna was beatified by Pope John Paul II on April 24, 1994, during the international Year of the Family. St. Gianna’s Feast Day is April 28, a day that we will celebrate with our little Gianna each year to remind her of the heroic woman she is named after.

Here are a few quotes from St. Gianna that I love:

• "Love and sacrifice are closely linked, like the sun and the light. We cannot love without suffering and we cannot suffer without love."
  
• "Let us love the Cross and let us remember that we are not alone in carrying it. God is helping us. And in God who is comforting us, as St. Paul says, we can do anything."
  
• "The stillness of prayer is the most essential condition for fruitful action. Before all else, the disciple kneels down."
  
• "The secret of happiness is to live moment by moment and to thank God for what He is sending us every day in His goodness."

 ELIZABETH: There is no doubt that next to Mary, Elizabeth is one of the most awesome women in the Bible. To begin with, her name means “worshiper of God”. She’s also the mother of St. John the Baptist. She was incredibly faithful and lived a holy life with her husband Zechariah, but despite fervent prayers, she had never born children. 

In her old age, one day when Zechariah was serving in the temple, the Angel Gabriel appeared and told him that they would have a son. In her 6^th months of pregnancy, the Virgin Mary (her relative) came to visit her and Elizabeth, “filled with the holy Spirit”, with humility proclaimed “Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And how have I deserved that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, the moment that the sound of thy greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who has believed, because the things promised her by the Lord shall be accomplished."

Elizabeth is a wonderful example to all of us. She was patient and submitted herself to the will of God, most importantly, had great faith. She was the first person to know of Jesus in Mary’s womb and let the Holy Spirit use her as an instrument to speak truth. We will pray that Gianna Elizabeth, too, will live by this example. 

 

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Saints Gianna and Elizabeth, pray for us!