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Following Peter

“With Their
very LIVES”
“The faith makes us fruitful, because it expands our hearts in hope and enables us to bear life-giving witness.” These are the Pope’s words in Porta Fidei. Here is a brief account of three “normal” lives molded by the encounter with Christ

ITALY
“You see, I am
going to heaven”
“Iam not afraid.” Francesca said it clearly, almost with a shout. In cases like this, they speak of “summoning up the last powers,” but it is the opposite. For her, her powers came all from that certainty, repeated to her husband a few hours before dying: “I am not afraid.” The same certainty had shaped life and death, health and sickness. Faith.
Francesca Pedrazzini was 38 years old, a year less than Vincenzo, her husband. She was a teacher, and he a lawyer, 12 years of marriage, three daughters (Cecilia, 10; Carlo, 7; and Sofia, 3); a full, joyful life, the life of someone who loves life: friends and work, family and the sea of Greece...
It was just as they were returning from their vacation in January 2010 that everything took an unexpected turn: a 2-inch mass in her breast. “It was tough from the start,” Vincenzo tells us. “We were afraid, but she faced it with her head held high. After the operation, we had started off again, enriched by the experience.” The tests and check-ups went well for a while. In March 2011, the doctors said, “Congratulations, you’re cured. It will be just a memory.” It wasn’t to be. In September, Francesca came back from vacation with a backache. Another series of tests showed she had metastasis in the bones and in the liver. It was at that time that she sent a text message to her friends. Everything is expressed there: “I am in peace because Jesus keeps His promise to make us happy. Travel this road with me and we’ll see. I am certain.”
“Francesca passed through all kinds of moods,” Sara, her sister, recalls. “Rebellion, anxiety, anguish... But the first instant was a ‘yes.’ She said, ‘It’s okay.’ She didn’t cry. I remember it well, because I was desperate, but not she.” Why? “She always lived the relationship with Christ decisively. She was consigned to Jesus, completely.”  She had a strong temperament, the type that clashes often with others. “But she had a clear intelligence of the instant,” Maria Chiara, her mother, asserts. Sara said, “One of the phrases that she repeated often was: ‘I am overcome by gratuitousness, by acceptance.’ We lived in constant companionship: e-mails, text messages, friends in the hospital and at home, people who were praying for her in every corner of the world....” The journey got tougher. Heavy chemotherapy, days spent between bed and sofa, but there was a little relief in the spring. The illness progressed, but Francesca felt better. “And she was tremendously happy,” says Vincenzo. “She kept saying, ‘I want to live the time the Lord grants me doing lovely things with my children.’” And the children? “They have always been a wonder for me,” answers Vincenzo, “because they have had great freedom. So their mother was not well? Okay, that was that. They suffered for it, but they simply faced up to what happened.” Another vacation marked the months for Vincenzo and Francesca, last July at Cervinia, with the Lombardy CL responsibles, and Fr. Julián Carrón, who told her tenderly: “Look, Francesca, we are all chronically ill, but you have an additional chance for maturing. You must not miss it.” There were two e-mails sent to her friends before and after that talk. You just have to read them. The first: “As soon as the exams go badly, tremendous anguish assails me. The future terrifies me, it breaks my heart to think of my children growing up without their mother and my husband growing old alone. I know that fear is not against the faith–even Jesus was afraid on the Cross–but it’s awful, and I don’t want to live what is left of my life with this fear in my heart, as if Christ’s embrace for me and for my family were unable to defeat it. I want to have a faith that truly has to do with life, and is this not worth more in the final test? If not, we are always looking for satisfaction where everyone else does, as Carrón said to Repubblica. The others perhaps look for satisfaction in money and power, and I look for it in health.” After the meeting, she wrote: “It’s the time of the person; if you are not taken up by the Event, there is nothing to be done, but if you are taken up, you can enter into any circumstance verifying that God does not falter even in an earthquake and you have a new ‘I.’ I am shaking a little, but I don’t want to miss this opportunity!!”
She didn’t miss it, but exploited it right up to the final days. Vincenzo tells us what happened: “When the doctors explained to me that there was little time left, I fell into a state of anguish. What should I do? Should I tell her or not? One day she looked at me and said, ‘Vince, you know you must be calm. I am sure of Jesus. I am not afraid, but curious as to what the Lord is preparing for me.’ But aren’t you sad? ‘No, I am peaceful. I’m only sorry for you, because your burden is heavier than mine.’ Here, there was a transformation. After those words, I was a different man. The anguish had vanished.” The following day, she asked to see the children, one by one. “You know, I’m going to Heaven. It’s a beautiful place; you shouldn’t be worried. You will miss me, I know, but I will see you and will always take care of you. When I go to heaven you must have a big party.” She was in peace, so much so that when she was already in a coma, her husband thought, “Franci, do you know, I would like to come with you? For the first time in my life I thought this, without any fear of death. I want to live like she lived this year.”
Francesca died on August 23rd. The funeral was something else, so much so that, at the end, a colleague said, “Don’t be offended, but it seemed like a party for me.” The taxi driver who brought a friend, when he saw the atmosphere, said, “Now I know why you dressed so elegantly–you are going to a wedding!” The wave that it generated is true. Her uncles, who had abandoned the faith 40 years ago, now attend Mass every day. An acquaintance of theirs who has a relative dying in the same hospital was struck. “I’d like to know why people are being converted over my cancer,” Francesca had said to a priest friend of hers. He replied, “It’s the mystery of the Cross.”
It is also the mystery of the Resurrection. “Our friendships have been transformed, all of them,” says Vincenzo. “They have become friends for destiny.” Fear has no more hold. “Before Franci died, I asked her what I should do with the children,” says Sara. “And she said, ‘Free yourself from this load. They will never be your children; you go on being an aunt. Don’t worry, and rest assured that Jesus fulfills the promise He has put in our hearts. He will do it for them, too.’” A few days ago, Vincenzo took the children to the Adventure Park, with the usual hanging bridges and rope swings. “At the end, Carlo turned around to me and asked, ‘Did Mummy see us?’” Yes, Carlo, she saw you, don’t worry.
Davide Perillo

CAMEROON
“You are worth more than ten children”
“You are a tree that does not bear fruit.” People’s eyes and comments whisper it, and it echoes inside her. In the African mentality, there is no escape for a woman who produces no children. “They are all there watching you, and waiting.” Month after month, year after year, but in Mireille there is only the pain of not being able to give a man she loves the greatest gift. “It was all I wanted.”
In Yaoundé, capital of Cameroon, with its million and a half population, it is an everyday fact for a husband to leave his wife, and take another one, even when there are children, and many of them. Imagine what it’s like when she cannot give him any.
Mireille and Victorien have been married for 13 years, and nothing of what she had imagined came to pass. Some years before marrying, Mireille, born in 1974, met CL. “Going to church was a formality. I had never felt the need to follow Jesus, He was so abstract. How could you possibly love Him?” Yet Christ called her to follow Him, just as He did with John and Andrew. “I asked two girls where they were going after the choir practice. ‘Come and see.’” Later on, when Victorien asked her to become his wife, she told him, “Know that this woman you want to marry is ‘made’ of faith. If you knew how I was before, you wouldn’t marry me.” And she imposed a condition, unthinkable in a culture in which the man is the master and boss: “Don’t stop me from following the way that ‘found’ me, because this is my life with Jesus.” All the same, her link with the Movement weakened for four years, during which marriage without children became unbearable.
One day, the phone rang: “Come and work with the street children.” It was Fr. Maurizio, a missionary who has a center for nanga boko, “those who sleep on the streets” and live between the street and the police cells. “I told Vitorien, ‘Let me go.’ It was my need to be a mother that was looking for an answer.” Those unwanted mal aimé children, little loved by their polygamous fathers and broken families, or who arrive in the capital from the northern grasslands, began to run to her calling her maman, and to grow to be men with her. But this was not the answer. “I have rediscovered the companionship of Christ and I have opened myself to the Mystery. I have learned to look at all reality for what it is–a gift.” She can no longer believe those who tell her that Christianity is a story of the whites. And her husband began to seek out what she is living, for himself.
Mireille continued to ask for a miracle, but the child did not come. “Why?” She cried out until she was exhausted. One day, Victorien told her not to cry any more: “For me, you are worth more than ten children. I would marry you again today.” An African man cannot talk like this. “There is only one reason for it,” she says. “In our marriage, there is Christ.”
This became clearer when their desire seemed to find an answer. Another phone call came that shook up their life: “It was my husband’s niece. She was expecting a child and wanted us to bring it up.” So now Andrée is living with them. “To hold her in my arms, to have her at home... at last the aim of our whole life had arrived,” said Mireille. “But it’s not, after all. This came to me clearly one evening.” She was at supper and Fr. Marco, a friend, is speaking of himself with tears in his eyes: “Nothing is enough for me. I want Christ to take all of me.” Andrée was running about; she stopped her, squeezing her without taking her eyes off Fr. Marco. “He was a changed man. His desire to give himself covered his face. In that instant, my daughter was in my arms, that child I had so much wanted, yet I didn’t feel her any more, it was as if she wasn’t there. In Marco’s eyes, Jesus was touching me, making me discover myself: I want more.”
Self-awareness, right to the depth of her being, has a power that is changing the world around her, here where people run to get baptized with their life still under the power of the spirits. “I am called to say that Christ is inside reality, and responds to the whole of me.”
Alessandra Stoppa

UNITED STATES
“Witnessing that
for which you live”
“Where do you go to Mass?” During a coffee break, Nancy throws the question to Guido. He replies, “To St. Charles Borromeo.” “When do you go?” “Every day.” “Can I come?” “Yes.” She is Protestant, he a Catholic, a Memor Domini, but Nancy doesn’t know this. Since 2001, when she transferred from Chicago, they have been working side by side at Walt Disney, in Los Angeles. In the past three years, they had become friends–going for lunch together and helping each other, getting other colleagues involved. For her, Guido, an Italian in the United States since 1993, was always a special person, but from the moment she posed that question, everything changed for Nancy. It was the beginning of a journey of faith.
When she first got to Los Angeles, she began to attend the various Protestant Churches. “I couldn’t find one that suited me. I had tried all of them. Guido was the last person I asked about church.” The following day, for the first time, she went to a Catholic Mass. “I asked Guido what I could do and he told me, ‘Everything except Communion.’ Something struck me immediately. The Liturgy of the day has a link with that of the previous day. It wasn’t a question of form. You are inside a history that reaches you. I began to go to Mass every day. The relationship between Jesus and me was no longer something intimistic; it was becoming flesh along with those people. It was investing my whole person and reality. It was a sense of completeness that I had never felt before.” Benedict XVI wrote in the Apostolic Letter Porta Fidei: “The heart indicates that the first act by which one comes to faith is God’s gift and the action of grace which acts and transforms the person deep within.”
In January 2005, Guido asked her to pray for a priest friend of his who was ill, Fr. Luigi Giussani. “I didn’t know who he was, but it was important for him. When he died, I went to Mass with Guido. I sat beside him in the first row.” She got to know other friends. The journey went on, including charitable work and School of Community. “The more I went, the more I experienced that there was something involving the whole of my life: a greater love, even than that of my mother. It had the taste of eternity”–to the point of her request for First Communion and Confirmation.
In the same year, Guido proposed that she resign from her job to set up a non-profit organization for the disabled and survivors of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why? “Because after the tsunami, I had told Guido that I wanted to give meaning to my time. He simply said, ‘Let’s get together in this need.’ The time was ripe and there was an opportunity to get something going. The fullness that I was living in my faith was the point of departure.” So the Los Angeles Habilitation House was born. Here, physically and psychologically disabled people are offered cleaning jobs, while war survivors are given the chance to work in administration. She and Guido had to learn everything, from operating a vacuum cleaner to how to deal with the disabled. “We began to ask everyone. In dealing with these people, I realized that I could not start off from my project. For the disabled, the first problem is the isolation; for the survivors, it’s the total lack of trust in everyone.” What is the method to go forward? “Being transparent; witnessing that for which you live, work, and move. And asking every day, ‘Are you happy in what you are doing? And if so, why? We judge the success of the work on this.’ No one has ever asked these questions.” Once, a survivor asked her if she had studied with Mother Teresa! “But this is my life. It is my faith that makes me experience that there is a way of looking at reality that takes your breath away and moves your heart, and opens you to everything.”
Paola Bergamini