As they shared life with her during her illness, Sabrina Beretta’s many friends came to realize that they were accompanying someone who had decided to say “yes” to the Lord in every circumstance of her life. This “yes” became for them a powerful witness to Christ’s victory. We offer here some of the reasons they gave for this judgment, a judgment achieved through reflection on time spent with her over the last 20 months.

Upon learning that she was sick with an advanced stage of metatastic melanoma, Sabrina phoned her fiancé Leo Marcatelli to ask him to take her the following weekend to Rochester, Minnesota, to visit the chapel of Saint Riccardo Pampuri. Accompanying them during this first visit were Fr. Jerry and some friends from Chicago, Giorgio and Manu.
On that hot day in July, 2005 they asked for the grace of healing first and foremost; but they also sought to understand what the Lord was demanding of her life, and begged to have the capacity to follow Him in everything He would ask of them.

Hope does not disappoint
To recognize Christ, we must take our human problem seriously–so says Fr. Giussani in The Journey to Truth Is an Experience. The truth of this methodological insight was becoming clearer to Leo: “We developed a close friendship with Fr. Jerry, and in November, at a dinner with the Memores Domini of Rochester, Jerry asked, ‘What does it mean that hope does not disappoint?’ To me it meant that if we kept praying very hard, the miracle of healing would happen. Instead, Sabrina showed me that real hope lies in our free adherence to the Lord’s design, which never disappoints.” Fr. Jerry was deeply moved by Sabrina’s attentiveness to her own constitutive needs: “She came to Saint Riccardo with incredible simplicity. She really knew how to ask and remain open to accepting the reality that was given to her, and she never grew tired of asking.”

Faith with reason
At first, the therapy for Sabrina’s cancer seemed to be working, albeit slowly. The prayers continued, but with a growing awareness of prayer’s true nature. Leo recalls, “Almost every night before I left her house we would sit down and pray. But before summer, things started to get worse. Every time bad news came, we would immediately say a prayer, most often the Memorare. I began to realize, however, that I was often praying out of ‘blind’ faith, a faith without reasons. Sabrina would remind me constantly that prayers are not magic formulas that we use to try to solve our problems; rather, when you pray you recognize and speak to a Presence. When there is a Presence, there is Someone to whom you can ask.” Sabrina’s condition soon prevented her from leading the Thursday night School of Community. So she and two of her friends who lived nearby, Sabrina Paganoni and Marta Botturi, decided to meet regularly to continue their work on Why the Church?
Sabrina Paganoni recalls the impact of these meetings: “I was nervous before School of Community, especially when we were reading Chapter 9: ‘The Locus of Verification: Human Experience.’ We learned there about elementary experience as ‘our complex of needs and evidences,’ and read the claim that the Church ‘can be recognized as credible because of its correspondence to man’s elementary needs.’ Fr. Giussani spoke of the ‘hundredfold,’ an ‘experience of fullness of life that you will not find elsewhere.’ But, I wondered, how can we speak about the hundredfold with someone who is dying, and knows it?”

Being with her was
an education
These essential questions strip us bare of our pretensions and make us perceive the pure need that we are. Though she sometimes arrived at School of Community moments after discussing with her doctor the catastrophic results of her latest CT scan, Sabrina showed no fear in front of such questions. She believed this reality of hers was about life and life eternal, even as the cancer was quickly conquering her body.
Sabrina taught her friends that “experience” is not only a name for something extremely beautiful, or something very difficult that results in a happy ending. Experience is not a “high” that satisfies “spiritual needs,” as if we are mere cravers of emotion, or nothing more than aesthetes. Rather, it is the fact of Christ coming to meet us in the banality of our everyday needs. Sabrina’s friends saw how she was determined by her needs, and lived accordingly: she needed to take her medicines in the right order so that she could fight her cancer; she needed to take a nap at a certain time so that she would be rested enough for dinner with Leo; she needed to eat certain foods so that she would not feel nauseated. “This was how she lived the hundredfold,” remarked Sabrina Paganoni. “In doing what she needed to do, she realized that her own life was not in her hands. She could not heal herself, nor could her doctor. But she kept asking for happiness. She kept asking for Jesus to come.” Sarah Bond likewise witnessed Sabrina’s fearlessness in front of her needs: “She never seemed embarrassed or ashamed to ask for help. This was especially striking because Sabrina was such a strong, independent, competent person. She reminds me that before God we should all be this way.” Precisely in her asking, Sabrina depended on Jesus. This was the most human way to live her illness.

The work of Another
In September 2006, Leo and Sabrina decided that it was best for her to move to Italy, because there was little the doctors could do in Chicago. Sabrina loved Chicago and her community, making it very difficult to leave her home there.
In Milan, friends raced to visit and help, spending much time with Sabrina and her sister Simona’s family. Sabrina’s health worsened, but her faith was stronger than ever. Leo recounts a visit they made to the monks of the Cascinazza: “One of them wrote this sentence on the first page of the book they gave her: ‘Our work, that is, our way of responding to the Lord, can remain incomplete.... The complete response to the Lord in our life is the desire that His Kingdom come’ (Luigi Giussani, In the Footsteps of Christ, p.106).”
Simona remembers the mysterious beauty of the final days: “Sabrina openly spoke about death, with plain words, as the factual circumstance she had to live. We prayed for her healing and we asked Our Lady to pray for us ‘now, and at the hour of our death.’ Well, you cannot play games when you speak about death. We may pretend that life is no mystery, we may somehow silence the disturbing questions about life. But the question about death remains. The mystery of death, in some sense, summons us to question and experience the mystery of life.”

The Face of the Mystery
Leo continues: “Sabrina’s positivity survived only because we were sustained by having truly met Christ Himself through Fr. Giussani and the friends of the Movement, in Milan and then in Chicago. These encounters made Sabrina’s faith tenacious, rooted in a reality made of people, of faces. Maybe the greatest testimony to this came from the pastor of her parish in Milan, who brought her communion each day: in the funeral homily he said he looked forward to every day, because he would be seeing her.” “This time has been difficult,” Leo says, “but the method was simple: I followed her as she was following that Christ whom Fr. Giussani brought to us. In the end I must acknowledge my gratitude to our friendship in Christ, because we have been shown the possibility of fully living every aspect of our life, including sickness and death. This is really nothing less than Christ’s Victory.”