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After six years of proceedings, the investigation into Chiara Corbella’s “life, virtues, and reputation for holiness” was solemnly closed in the Basilica of St. John Lateran on Friday.
Despite the scorching heat that has descended on Rome in recent days, hundreds of faithful filled just over half the immense nave of the Pope’s cathedral.
Normally, this kind of legal ceremony – a stage in the beatification process – is held in one of the functional rooms on the top floor of the vicarage. But the reputation of Chiara Corbella Petrillo, this young girl of the people of Rome, who died at the age of 28 in 2012, seems to have won the hearts of many Romans and pushed them to descend on the basilica.
In the congregation could be seen a few nuns, some lost pilgrims, but above all a great many families, a particularly unusual presence in a country like Italy where the birth rate reaches ever more worrying depths every year. The presence of dozens of strollers, numerous couples of all ages surrounded by their children, and a certain constant bustle orchestrated by little feet and voices, were there to bear witness to another vision of life, that of Chiara Corbella.
And at the forefront of these sometimes very numerous tribes was a single-parent family unlike any other, that of a father, Enrico Petrillo, and his 13-year-old son, Francesco. They were Chiara’s husband and son. She would have been 40 this year.
Chiara Corbella, the Biblical suffering Job in the 21st century
Chiara and Enrico met on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, fell in love and were married in Assisi in 2008. This particularly devout couple, close to the Neocatechumenal Way, then experienced the pain of the premature loss of their first two children, Maria Grazia Letizia and Davide Giovanni, both suffering from terminal development issues in the womb.
The Petrillos faced the cross that so many couples face with strength and courage, not hesitating to bear witness to their experiences in order to help other families. But their via doloris, compared during the ceremony to Job’s biblical misfortunes, didn’t stop there.
Shortly after becoming pregnant with her third child, Chiara discovered she had cancer.
As with the first two pregnancies, some doctors, concerned about the mother’s health, suggested abortion to the couple. Chiara once again refused. She also categorically refused an operation to cure her cancer so as not to endanger her son, despite the risk of the disease progressing as the couple waited to deliver the baby before attempting surgery. Francesco was born in 2011 in perfect health.
Four days after giving birth, Chiara underwent surgery and began intensive chemotherapy, but it was already too late and she died a year later, on June 13, 2012. On June 16, thousands of people who had heard the story flocked to the young mother’s funeral.
The sky’s the limit
At the inquest’s closing ceremony, Rome’s vice-regent, Monsignor Baldassare Reina, paid a vibrant tribute to Chiara’s “uncommon joy”: She remained smiling and happy, even in her face-to-face encounter with death.
“In our time, when man seems to limit the horizon of life to the earthly sojourn, contingent on the visible world,” emphasized Mgr Reina, Chiara Corbella’s testimony is particularly essential in reminding men “that their horizon is not earth, but heaven.”
Invited to speak, the husband of the deceased, before a visibly moved assembly, briefly confided, with a beaming smile on his face, the “beauties” revealed to him by his wife at the height of her grief: “that of a joyful and gentle God.”
“When I asked Chiara if the cross was really sweet, she answered in the affirmative,” he testified.
This courageous mother is now preparing to be recognized as venerable. Her “dossier,” solemnly sealed at the ceremony, has been forwarded to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, which will determine whether the young mother can be recognized by the Church, by virtue of her admirable life, as “venerable.”
If this is the case, the next step for her cause is beatification, followed by canonization. For the cause to progress to those two stages, miracles attributed to her intercession will have to be confirmed.
And today we celebrate...