At age 4 she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Despite her own nearly lifelong illness, Ogier devoted herself to helping the sick.
As a teenager in the 1970s, she felt called to involve herself in the fierce debates happening over abortion in Italy. Together with her father, who was the head of obstetrics and gynecology at a local hospital, they hosted talks in support of unborn life.
These meetings later became the source of Italy’s first “Aid to Life” Center in 1978, which was the inspiration for the national pro-life organization Movement for Life.
Ogieri died in Rome in 1974 at the age of 19.
Brazilian seminarian Guido Vidal França Schäffer is a third layperson who has taken a step forward on the path to beatification.
Schäffer was a lifelong member of the Catholic charismatic movement Rinnovamento nello Spirito Santo. He would use his love for surfing as an opportunity to befriend other young adults and share the Gospel with them.
He had graduated as a doctor specialized in general medicine when he felt the call to be a priest. Schäffer began seminary studies at the age of 28 while continuing to serve as a voluntary doctor in a medical clinic.
On May 1, 2009, about a year before the 34-year-old expected to be ordained a priest, he hit his head and drowned while surfing off the coast of Brazil not far from Rio de Janeiro.
The priests and religious sisters who will now be called “venerable” by the Church are Father Simon Mpeke, also called Baba Simon, a Cameroonian priest (1906–1975); Father Pedro Díez Gil, a Spanish priest of the Order of Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools (1913–1983); Italian Sister Edda Roda of the Capuchin Sisters of Mother Rubatto (1940–1996); and Brazilian Sister Tereza Margarida do Coração de Maria, a cloistered nun of the Order of Discalced Carmelites (1915–2005).
Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency's senior Rome correspondent. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and has a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri.