ST GIANNA BERETTA MOLLA: A WHITE COAT, SKIS AND LOVE LETTERS!
Doctor, volunteer, sportswoman, wife and mother. Gianna’s life has many chapters: read them all before the last one.
In the consulting room by day, in the mountains in her free time: Gianna had more than one passion. Her Vatican biography remembers her work with mothers, children, older people and people in poverty, as well as her love of skiing and mountaineering. These details introduce us to far more than the story of her final pregnancy.
A doctor in Lombardy
Born in Magenta on 4 October 1922, she graduates in medicine in Pavia in 1949 and opens a practice in Mesero the following year. In 1952 she specialises in paediatrics in Milan. Alongside her profession she finds time for Catholic Action and service with the Society of St Vincent de Paul.
On 24 September 1955 she marries Pietro Molla; Pierluigi, Mariolina and Laura follow. At her canonisation in 2004, John Paul II also quotes a letter she wrote to her future husband. There is a real love story in Gianna’s life, waiting to be discovered in the original documents.
Those months need a precise account
During her fourth pregnancy she is diagnosed with a uterine fibroma. She undergoes surgery at San Gerardo Hospital in Monza on 6 September 1961, and the pregnancy continues. Gianna Emanuela is born on 21 April 1962; Gianna dies on 28 April, aged thirty-nine. The chronology on the website dedicated to her identifies the cause as septic peritonitis after childbirth.
Saying she “refused all treatment” is incorrect: it erases the operation and the efforts to save mother and daughter. The Church honours her choice to protect her baby, while her story also preserves the distinct facts of the surgery, birth and complications.
Gianna is canonised on 16 May 2004 and remembered on 28 April. Her life does not prescribe other women’s medical decisions: every pregnancy needs skilled doctors and informed choices. To know her fully, return to her white coat, volunteering and mountains, too.
