Bl. Chiara Badano

Chiara Badano's parents waited eleven years for her. She was born in Sassello, in the diocese of Acqui Terme, on 29 October 1971. At nine she joined the Focolare movement, and it stuck — she brought her parents in with her. In primary school she gave her snack to a classmate who had none; when her mother started packing two, she gave that away too. She carried heavy things for a woman the village had pushed to the edges and called her signora. At eleven she made herself a plan: to love the people she didn't like.

In February 1989, at seventeen, a shoulder pain during a tennis match turned out to be osteosarcoma with widespread metastases. She had surgery, then twenty months of decline. She refused morphine — it clouded her, she said, and her pain was the one thing she still had to offer. When she lost the use of her legs, she said the Lord had given her wings instead. She gave away the 1,300,000 lire she had saved to a volunteer digging wells in Benin: "I don't need it, I have everything." From bed, working the phone book herself, she booked her parents a Valentine's dinner and told them not to come home before midnight.

Her friends had mocked her for years, calling her "the nun," and it hurt. Doctors used words like unnatural and incredible for how she bore the end. She asked that her corneas be donated; two people can see because of it. She died at dawn on 7 October 1990, eighteen years old. Her last words to her mother: "Be happy, because I am." Chiara Lubich had already given her a second name — Luce, light. She was beatified on 25 September 2010, the first Focolare member raised to the altars.