Denver, Colo., Sep 30, 2010 / 12:56 pm
Last Saturday, September 25, Chiara “Luce” Badano - an Italian teenager whose short life showed extraordinary holiness - was officially beatified in a ceremony outside of Rome. In his latest video for Catholic News Agency, Archdiocese of Denver youth and campus ministry director Chris Stefanick describes the life and witness of “the first member of Generation X” to be considered for sainthood.
Chiara was her parents' only child, a long-awaited daughter born in 1971 after 11 years of their marriage. She and her parents were strongly involved with Focolare, a movement with Catholic roots that promotes world peace.
As a teenager, she took great joy in life, and seemed poised for a promising future. “She had a bright life, a beautiful face - all the boys loved her,” Stefanick recounts. “She would go to coffee shops, she was into mountain climbing and tennis.”
The young woman wanted to work as a flight attendant. Instead, as Stefanick describes, her life took a course that most would consider to be tragic: “One day when she was a teenager she was playing tennis and got an excruciating pain in her shoulder … After that, she was diagnosed with a very rare, painful form of bone cancer.” Her resolve to fight the cancer was contradicted by the results of repeated tests.