Beata Clara Lux Badano, Virgo — honoured on the twenty-ninth day of October, the day of her birth, where her cult is permitted.
Adimpleo ea quæ desunt passionum Christi, in carne mea, pro corpore eius, quod est ecclesia. “I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church.” — Colossians 1:24
I. A note on this entry
This entry is outside the usual run of this series. Chiara Badano died in 1990 and was beatified in 2010, and so she has no Mass, no Collect, and no commemoration in the Missal of 1962. In the traditional calendar today belongs to the ferial Mass of the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost. She is included here for a different reason. The Church has declared, by a judgment on her heroic virtue and on a miracle, that this teenage girl from a Ligurian mountain village is in heaven and may be honoured publicly where that honour is permitted. Her life shows that the old teaching on suffering, offered in union with the Cross, still produces saints in our own age. That teaching is set out in St. Paul, St. Thomas, and Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis.
As in every entry, what follows separates what is documented from what is devotional. Most of what we know of Chiara comes from her parents, her friends, her letters, and the testimony gathered for her cause. It is recent and abundant. It is not yet the work of critical historians.
II. A child asked of God
Ruggero Badano, a lorry driver, and Maria Teresa Caviglia married at twenty-six and waited eleven years for a child. Their daughter was born on the twenty-ninth of October, 1971, in Sassello, a small town in the hills above Savona in the Diocese of Acqui. She was their only child. Her mother later said that they knew at once she was not only theirs: she belonged first to God, and they had to raise her with respect for her freedom.
The stories of her early childhood are small and domestic, which is part of their value. At four she gave her new toys, not the old ones, to poor children. Once, coming home from nursery school, she brought an apple she had taken from a neighbour’s tree, and her mother made her take it back and apologise. As a girl she visited sick classmates and the elderly of the town, and she returned again and again to one old woman in the Sassello nursing home to wash her face and straighten her bed. None of this is extraordinary. It is the ordinary material out of which God makes extraordinary things.
III. The Gospel, rediscovered
In 1980, at about the age of nine, Chiara came into contact with the Focolare Movement, the lay association founded by Chiara Lubich in Trent in 1943. The next year she went with her parents to the movement’s Familyfest in Rome, and she joined its young people’s branch, the Gen. (The sources differ slightly over which of these two events came first; the dates given here follow the Focolare’s own account.) She began a correspondence with Lubich that lasted the rest of her life. At her request Lubich gave her a new name to mark a new beginning: Chiara Luce, “Chiara Light.”
What she took from the movement, in her own words, was the Gospel itself. In a letter from these years she wrote that she had rediscovered it. She had not been an authentic Christian, because she had not lived it fully, and she now wanted to make that book the only goal of her life. She said, too, that she did not try to bring Jesus to her friends by talking about Him. She tried to bring Him by how she lived.
At the centre of Focolare spirituality is the figure Lubich called Jesus Forsaken: Christ on the Cross crying Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani?, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). The member is taught to recognise Him in every pain and every abandonment, and to embrace Him there. In a letter home from Rome as a teenager, Chiara wrote that this had been for her a true encounter with Jesus Forsaken. She did not yet know how literally she would be asked to live it.
IV. An ordinary adolescence
It would be false to Chiara to make her a plaster saint. She was a pretty, athletic girl with many friends. She loved tennis, swimming, the mountains, music and the town café. She had a strong will and could be stubborn. When she went down to Savona for secondary school, she failed her first year, and she felt it keenly, along with other disappointments of adolescence. Those who knew her describe a girl who was joyful, not pious in manner, and very much of her time.
This is important for understanding what followed. Her holiness was not a temperament. It was what grace did with an ordinary girl who had said yes to the Gospel and meant it.
V. “If You want it, I want it too”
In the summer of 1988, when she was sixteen, Chiara felt a sharp pain in her shoulder during a game of tennis. The tests that followed found an osteogenic sarcoma, a malignant cancer of the bone, which had already spread. She went home from the hospital and, by her mother’s account, asked not to talk about it. For about twenty-five minutes she lay on her bed in silence. Then she came out and said she was ready, and she never went back on it. Her mother later called that half-hour Chiara’s Gethsemane.
The words she repeated through the two years of her illness have become her signature: Per te, Gesù; se lo vuoi tu, lo voglio anch’io. “For You, Jesus. If You want it, I want it too.” When chemotherapy took her hair, she offered each lock that fell with the same words. When the disease took the use of her legs, she said that if she had to choose between walking again and going to heaven, she would choose heaven without hesitating. Later she wrote that she had nothing left, but she still had her heart, and with it she could love.
She did love. In hospital in Turin she walked the corridors with a fellow patient sunk in depression, though walking hurt her terribly. She gave the whole of her savings to a friend who was leaving for the missions in Africa, telling him she no longer needed the money because she had everything. Friends from the movement who came to cheer her found, as one of them said, that they were the ones who needed her. When her parents would not leave her bedside, she booked them a table for dinner on St. Valentine’s Day and told them not to come back before midnight. She was already preparing them to live without her.
She refused morphine for long stretches of her illness. Her reason, as her family reported it, was that it took away her lucidity, and she wanted to offer Jesus her pain with a clear mind. Here the Church’s teaching needs to be stated carefully. Pius XII, speaking to anaesthesiologists in 1957, taught that the use of pain-relieving drugs by the dying is morally lawful, even when it dulls consciousness, provided the dying person can still fulfil their essential duties to God and neighbour. He added that to refuse such relief in order to share more fully in the sufferings of Christ is permitted and can be heroic, but it is not required, and it is not the norm for Christians. Chiara’s choice belongs to that second category. It is to be admired, not prescribed.
VI. The wedding
As the end came near, Chiara planned her own funeral. She chose the readings and the hymns, the flowers, the way her hair would be done, and a white dress, a bridal dress, because, as she said, she was going to meet her Bridegroom. She told her mother not to cry when she dressed her, but to say: “Now Chiara Luce sees Jesus.” She asked that the people at her funeral sing with all their hearts rather than weep. When her father asked whether she wished to donate her corneas, she agreed with a smile.
She made her last confession and received Holy Communion. She died early on the morning of the seventh of October, 1990, with her parents beside her. It was the day the Church has kept since St. Pius V as the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary; that year it fell on a Sunday. Her last words were to her mother: Ciao, mamma, sii felice perché io lo sono. “Goodbye, Mamma. Be happy, because I am.”
About two thousand people came to her funeral, and the mayor closed the town for the day. Bishop Livio Maritano of Acqui, who had known her personally, presided. He said afterwards that joy had ruled the day, with tears and smiles strangely mingled together.
VII. The cause
Bishop Maritano opened the diocesan process for her beatification in 1999. On the third of July, 2008, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints published the decree on her heroic virtues, and she was declared Venerable. On the nineteenth of December, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI approved the decree recognising a miracle through her intercession: the sudden and complete healing of a boy from Trieste with severe fulminant meningitis, whom the doctors had expected to die within forty-eight hours.
She was beatified on the twenty-fifth of September, 2010, at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Divine Love outside Rome. Archbishop Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation, presided on the Pope’s behalf, and her parents were present. She was the first member of the Focolare Movement to be raised to the altars. Her feast was set on the day of her birth, the twenty-ninth of October. Her body rests in her family’s chapel in the cemetery of Sassello, which has become a place of pilgrimage, especially for the young.
A word of honesty is owed here. The Focolare Movement’s ecumenical and interreligious work has drawn serious criticism from traditional Catholics, and the questions they raise are real. But a beatification is a judgment about a person, not a movement’s programme. What the Church has declared is that Chiara Badano practised the theological and moral virtues to a heroic degree, and that God has confirmed this by a miracle. That judgment can be received whole, without endorsing everything said or done by the movement that formed her.
VIII. What the old theology sees in her
Chiara’s language was the language of a twentieth-century lay movement. What she lived is much older. The tradition has three names for it.
Coredemptive suffering. St. Paul rejoiced to fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in his flesh, for his body, which is the Church (Col. 1:24). Nothing is lacking in the merit of Christ’s Passion. What remains to be filled up is its application, as members of His Body share in His sufferings for the good of the whole. Pius XII put it in Mystici Corporis (1943): it is a deeply mysterious truth, he says in substance, that the salvation of many depends on the prayers and voluntary penances of the members of the Mystical Body, offered for that purpose. A girl in a hospital bed in Turin, unable to walk, was doing apostolic work.
The dereliction understood rightly. Focolare devotion to Jesus Forsaken rests on the cry from the Cross, and the traditional theology of that cry protects it from misreading. St. Thomas teaches (Summa Theologiae III, q. 47) that the Father “delivered up” the Son not by breaking the union between them, which cannot be broken, but by not shielding His human nature from suffering. The Son was abandoned to pain, not abandoned by God. That is exactly the shape of Chiara’s “If You want it, I want it too.” She did not experience her illness as God’s absence. She experienced it as a share in what He had allowed His own Son to undergo.
The bridal soul. Her white dress was not sentiment. The Church has always seen the consecrated virgin as a bride of Christ, and the Fathers saw every faithful soul in the bride of the Canticle. Chiara, who was never professed in any religious order, went to her death as the wise virgins went out with their lamps to meet the Bridegroom (Matt. 25:1-13). Her name, Luce, fits that parable: the light was oil carried to the end.
IX. What her life teaches
That holiness is not postponed until adulthood. The Church has long honoured young saints, St. Agnes, St. Dominic Savio, St. Maria Goretti, but our age often treats the young as though serious holiness were not yet expected of them. Chiara refutes this. She was a teenager with tennis and friends and failed exams, and she became a saint before she was nineteen.
That a single yes, renewed, is enough. She did not become holy by a long programme of mortification. She said yes once, after half an hour of silence, and then kept saying it, lock by lock and day by day, until there was nothing left to give but her heart.
That suffering offered is never wasted. To the world, a girl dying of bone cancer at eighteen is a pure loss. To the faith, she was filling up in her flesh what was wanting of the sufferings of Christ for His Church. The miracle at Trieste is God’s public signature on that truth.
That death is a wedding. She planned her funeral as a marriage because she believed it was one. The Christian is not taught to pretend that death is nothing. He is taught that it is the coming of the Bridegroom.
Practice
Examine. When pain or disappointment comes, what is my first word: complaint, or for You, Jesus? Have I treated my own sufferings, great or small, as wasted, when they could have been offered for the Church? Do I expect holiness of the young people in my care, or do I quietly assume it can wait?
Do. Offer one specific pain or frustration today, by name, for a specific person or intention. If you know someone who is seriously ill, visit, call, or write to them this week, not to cheer them up, but, as Chiara’s friends found, to receive from them.
Pray. Blessed Chiara has no Collect in the 1962 Missal. Pray instead the Collect of today’s Mass, which asks the author of godliness to bring to effect what we ask in faith:
Deus, refugium nostrum et virtus: adesto piis Ecclesiæ tuæ precibus, auctor ipse pietatis, et præsta; ut, quod fideliter petimus, efficaciter consequamur. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“O God, our refuge and strength, Thou who art the author of all godliness, give ear to the devout prayers of Thy Church; and grant that what we ask in faith we may effectually obtain. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Per te, Gesù; se lo vuoi tu, lo voglio anch’io. “For You, Jesus. If You want it, I want it too.”
Devote. It is Thursday, the day of the Blessed Sacrament, and the last days of the month of the Holy Rosary. Chiara died on the feast of the Rosary and received her last Communion as Viaticum. Make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, and pray the Sorrowful Mysteries for the sick and dying, especially the young, dwelling on the Crucifixion and the cry Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path sets Blessed Chiara beside the young saints of the tradition, St. Agnes, St. Dominic Savio, St. Maria Goretti, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose little way her life closely resembles. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the theology of coredemptive suffering in Colossians 1:24 and Mystici Corporis, St. Thomas on the dereliction of Christ, and the moral teaching of Pius XII on pain relief at the end of life. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up the morning offering and the practice of offering daily sufferings for the Church. The Church History path considers how the Church judges the holiness of a person apart from the movement that formed her.
Beata Clara Lux, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 47; Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi (1943) and his address to anaesthesiologists of 24 February 1957; the decrees of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints on her heroic virtues (3 July 2008) and on the miracle (19 December 2009); the testimony of her parents, Ruggero and Maria Teresa Badano, as published by the Focolare Movement; the official account of her life issued by the Focolare Movement for her beatification; contemporary reports of her cause and beatification. Her words are given as reported by her family and the witnesses to her cause. Pius XII is given in paraphrase.