Blessed Chiara Luce Badano

Chiara Badano was born in Sassello, in the Ligurian hinterland, on October 29, 1971. Her parents, Ruggero and Maria Teresa, had waited eleven years for her. She was a perfectly ordinary girl: school, tennis, swimming, music, friends. At nine she came into contact with the Focolare Movement and began writing to Chiara Lubich. In 1988, during a tennis match, she felt a pain in her shoulder. In February 1989 came the diagnosis: osteosarcoma with metastases. She was seventeen. She had surgery at the Molinette hospital in Turin, underwent chemotherapy and radiation, and lost the use of her legs. What struck everyone around her — doctors, nurses, classmates — was the way she went through those eighteen months. She refused morphine so she could stay lucid. She kept looking after the other patients on the ward. When her mother asked how she was, she answered by talking about something else. It was Chiara Lubich who gave her the name we remember her by: Chiara Luce. She planned her own funeral, and asked that it not be a funeral but a celebration: she wanted a white dress, like a bride, and told her mother not to cry because there was no reason to. She died in Sassello on October 7, 1990, at eighteen. She was beatified in 2010, and her memorial is celebrated on October 29, the day she was born. If your name is Clare, today is your name day.