Summary
Chiara suffered greatly from the death of her first two children but was able to imitate Mary and to surrender to God her inability to understand. Chiara saw that God purified her through the death of her second child. When she was dying from cancer, Chiara continued to allow Jesus to shine through her.
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Reflective Study Guide Questions
“Israel, hope in the Lord, now and forever.”
Ps. 131:3
1. After Chiara learned the bad news about her first pregnancy, she was able to see her situation in light of Mary’s situation after becoming pregnant with Jesus. How can you similarly turn to Mary for help and inspiration when you are faced with suffering?
2. Chiara knew that she would not be able to fully understand God’s plan for the situation of her first pregnancy. Do you have any painful situations in your life that you cannot fully understand? How can you work on surrendering them to God?
3 . After Chiara’s second child died, she came to see his life as what was needed to purify her. She said that he knocked down the “goliaths” in her life. What might God be using in your life to purify you and knock down your goliaths?
4. As Chiara suffered from terminal cancer, she continued to let Jesus shine through her dark night of suffering. How can you work on letting Jesus shine through you even when you are suffering?
Text: Servant of God Chiara Corbella Petrillo and the Sacrament of the Present Moment, Part 1
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Pray More Advent Retreat. My name’s Claire Dwyer. I’m so excited to be able to journey with you this Advent, share some talks with you on this retreat. I’d like to tell you a little bit about myself and then we will be begin with a prayer.
An Introduction
So I’m a wife. I’m a mom of six kids and now two grandchildren, unbelievably. I enjoy spending time with my family in our home in Phoenix, Arizona, I’m originally from Wisconsin, and I work full-time remotely for the Avila Foundation as the content editor of spiritualdirection.com and the senior copywriter for the Foundation. I fully appreciate the power of the written word, and so I’m a writer myself. I am the author of “This Present Paradise: A Spiritual Journey With St. Elizabeth of the Trinity,” which was published by Sophia Institute Press in 2021. And I also write for Blessed is She as a daily devo writer and a devotional writer and all different places online.
Because I know so intimately the power of the written word, I am also the co-founder of an organization called Write These Words and the Praise Writers writing community for Catholic writers, where I just encourage Catholics to harness their stories and the power of words and put them in the service of the gospel, because the world today so desperately needs to know words of hope and words of truth and words of beauty.
If you want to find out more about any of those things, you can see my bio and there’ll be links to all of the ways that you can follow me and work with me there. But for now, I’m excited to share with you a series of talks for Advent on this retreat. This talk in particular will be the first of two talks on the life of Servant of God, Chiara Corbella Petrillo, and particularly I’ll be drawing from this book, “A Witness to Joy,” also published by Sophia Institute Press.
So if you want to find out more about her life, I highly encourage you to get this book and read a more complete biography of her. This first talk will be about her life and then the second talk in this series will be about the lessons that we can learn from her life, how to apply them to ourselves, particularly the lesson of living fully in the present moment, which in Advent all of us so desperately need to be reminded of, I believe. So we’re going to talk about Chiara’s life in this talk, but before we do that, let’s begin with a prayer.
Opening Prayer
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Dear Lord, I thank you for making a way in our wilderness, a way to come together to learn about the life of your beautiful daughter, Chiara. Open our minds and our hearts to the lessons of her life. Help us to make them our own so that we can live more fully united with you, conform to your will, and more fully in this present moment. We ask all of this in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, the Word incarnate, whose birth we await with expectation and hope. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.
Chiara Corbella’s Life
All right, well first of all, let me give you the broadest picture of Chiara’s life so you can just get this big overview of who she is. She’s a Servant of God. She was declared a Servant of God by Pope Francis in 2018. After dying at the age of 28 when she had buried her first two children, despite being pressured to abort them because she knew they would only live for a short time after birth. And then while she was pregnant with her third child she found out that she was suffering from cancer, but she would postpone medical treatment which could have prolonged or even saved her life because she was very concerned with the unborn child living within her and wanted him to have the greatest chance of life.
Chiara’s Early Relationship & Marriage
So she’s this great model of Christian joy and hope in the face of suffering. She’s also a great model for mothers, and I believe a great intercessor for the pro-life movement today. So it’s her life that we’re going to be diving into in this talk. She was born in Rome in 1984 to a devout Catholic family. She was one of two daughters and they were very involved in the Charismatic Renewal. So Chiara would grow up going to, like, Life in the Spirit Seminars, and the Holy Spirit was a great part of her life.
Her husband, Enrico, also grew up in the Charismatic movement, but they were part of two different groups, and they didn’t meet until 2002 when they were both on pilgrimages in Medjugorje. They started a courtship that was long and tumultuous and were finally married in 2008. Later they would say that those years of courtship that were so hard were hard partly because they had to overcome their fears of abandonment and loss. And as you’ll see in their story, it would seem like the Lord was really purifying them and preparing them for what they were going to have to go through in their short married life. Almost immediately after their marriage, they were expecting their first baby and they were absolutely thrilled to be parents. But during the 14-week prenatal exam, after it was discovered that the baby was a girl, it was discovered that she had anencephaly. That meant she had no skull, which meant there was no chance for her to survive after birth.
Now, Enrico was not present at the time that she had this exam, and so Chiara had to face the news alone. But the doctor noted how composed Chiara was when she found out, and although she would cry in her mother’s arms in the waiting room afterward, it would seem that she had total peace. However, that night, which she spent alone because Enrico was still at the hospital, Chiara began to experience a lot of fear and anxiety. And she would later reveal that that night as she prayed and as she worried about what Enrico was going to say when he found out, she looked at an image of Our Lady.
And it says in the book, quote, “Looking at that image of the Holy Mother of God, she remained thunderstruck. She saw herself in the Virgin Mary, in her same situation: a special pregnancy, a child who would die before her eyes, and the weight of telling Joseph who did not yet know anything. To both, to her and to Mary, God had asked the same thing. Little by little, her horizon was transformed. ‘I could not ask to be able to understand everything all at once,’ she said. ‘The Lord had a plan I could not understand.'”
When she broke the news to Enrico, he said of Maria Grazia, which was the name of their baby, which means Mary Grace, he said, “Don’t worry, she is our daughter. We will accompany her as long as we can.” And for Chiara, that was the first miracle. So the pregnancy continued even though, unbelievably, many of their Christian and even Catholic friends advised them to abort, they believed that the pregnancy should not continue, which was such a tremendous suffering for them as parents. So the pregnancy would continue, and eventually Maria Grazia would be born. She would only live for 40 minutes, but they would have the grace of baptizing her. And Chiara would say after leaving the hospital that that short time with their daughter was such a gift that she would say, “You know, I would do it all over again.”
And she would, because soon after that, she was pregnant again with a little boy, Davide Giovanni. Now, they would discover during an ultrasound of that pregnancy that Davide only had one leg, and the leg that he had was only a stump. So Enrico and Chiara would prepare themselves to be the parents of a special needs child. And they were all in, they started to research prosthetics, they wanted Davide to have the best life that he could, but a fourth ultrasound would reveal that not only did he not have legs, but he also did not have kidneys, that there was no amniotic fluid, that his lungs were never going to develop, and that there were all kinds of malformations and that Davide also would not survive long after birth, if he survived the birth at all.
It was a huge blow and a terrible shock. And incredibly, genetic testing would reveal that it had absolutely nothing to do with Maria Grazia’s issues. So these were two totally separate medical issues that they were going to be dealing with. So they carried the pregnancy to term, once again, entrusting their baby to the Lord, going straight to the adoration chapel after they received the news. They made it to the hospital just in time for Davide’s birth and just in enough time for him to be baptized before he died in his parents’ arms.
Davide’s Impact on Chiara’s Life
Now, his short life had a tremendous impact on Chiara. She would write that Davide would, quote, “Knock down the Goliaths in her life.” And it was his life that purified her will and matured her spiritual life. And I wanna read you something that she wrote of Davide’s life after he died. She wrote, “Who is Davide? A little one who received as a gift from God a very important role, that of knocking down the great Goliaths that are inside each one of us, knocking down our power as parents as we made decisions about him and for him. He showed us that he would grow and that he was like this because God had need of him like this.
He knocked down our right to desire a child that was for us, because he was only for God. He knocked down the desire of those who called him a child of consolation, the one who would make us forget the sorrow of Maria Grazia Letizia. He knocked down the trust in the statistic that claimed that we had the same probability of having a healthy child as anyone else. He unmasked the magical faith of the one who thinks he knows God and then asks him to be the candy vending machine. He demonstrated that God performs miracles, but not with our logical limitations, because God is something greater than our desires. He knocked down the idea of those who seek not salvation of the soul in God, but only that of the body; of all those who ask God for a happy and simple life that does not at all resemble the life of the cross that Jesus left us. Davide, so little, hurled himself with strength against our idols, and I thank God for my having been defeated by my little Davide. I thank God that the Goliath that was inside of me was now finally dead thanks to Davide.”
Francesco’s Birth and Chiara’s Health
Chiara would become pregnant again, and this time the little boy would be healthy, but Chiara was not. A white lesion appeared on her tongue and began to grow and it was found to be carcinoma. Chiara, who had never smoked a day in her life, had cancer all over her tongue and the nearby nerve tissue and the blood vessels. While she was pregnant she did have one surgery, but she opted for the sake of the baby only to have local anesthesia. She would need another surgery which would have to be postponed until the baby was full term, and she refused to induce the baby early, even when his lungs were ready, because she wanted to give Francesco, the baby, the best chance at life.
Little Francesco would have an uncomplicated birth and he would be born perfectly healthy. And a few days after his birth, Chiara would have another surgery in which they would cut away more of her tongue. After that surgery, her lymph nodes would test positive for an aggressive kind of cancer, and so she would begin chemo and radiation, and she would spend after Francesco’s birth suffering tremendously. By spring, the cancer had returned, and it had spread to her lungs, her liver, her eye, and her neck. When Enrico was given the news, he just burst into tears immediately because he knew what it meant. The cancer was terminal.
Enrico took Chiara to the hospital chapel to tell her the news, and there they embraced each other, they wept, and they repeated their marriage vows. Deciding against treatments that would have been the cause of tremendous suffering but would only have prolonged her life a little bit, Chiara prepared to go home to die. And so she went back to her hospital room and the nurses heard her talking to her roommates that she had shared the room with while she was in the hospital. And she told them, quote, “Keep praying as we did these nights and remember that we are here to make things better for others.” And they realized that she had been leading her roommates in prayer during their nights in the hospital together.
Well, she would spend the next few months doing the same thing, leading other people closer to God in prayer, hosting friends for weekly rosaries and adoration, and bearing the pain with so much patience and tolerance that the doctors didn’t even know how to medicate her because they couldn’t tell what her threshold was because she was so composed and so peaceful. But she was truly on the cross, suffering tremendously.
Chiara’s Death
On June 12th, 2012, she was deteriorating so rapidly that her family called Father Vito, her spiritual director who had baptized her babies and prepared her for marriage, and he rushed home from a vacation he was on to say a final mass in her room. And the gospel reading that mass was, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world,” and Chiara was attentive to every word. During the homily, Father Vito asked her, “What is Jesus’ lampstand?” And Chiara answered, “The cross.” and he said, “Chiara, you are luminous because you are on the lampstand with Jesus.” Now, the name Chiara is no accident, because Chiara means light and bright and clear, and she was just radiantly letting Jesus shine through her even in the dark night of her own suffering. She made it through that night on oxygen and the next morning Enrico sent a message to all of their friends saying, “The lamps are lit. We are waiting for the Spouse.”
And as Chiara repeated to everyone, “I love you, I love you all,” Father Vito read the Ascension Psalms, which pilgrims pray traditionally as they approach the holy city of Jerusalem, and she died in her room listening to those Psalms on June 13th, 2012. Now, in the next talk, as I said, we’re gonna discuss some of the lessons we can learn from Chiara’s short life, but for now, let’s end in prayer. And what I wanna do is I want to end by praying with you from one of the Ascension Psalms, Psalm 131.
Closing Prayer
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. But I have weaned and quietened myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forevermore. Dear Lord, quiet and still our souls as we approach the holy moment of your birth. May we be like Chiara, serene and content and composed, fully disposed to your will. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.
About Claire Dwyre
Because each of us is called to co-create a masterpiece of our lives in cooperation with God, Claire Dwyer writes and speaks at the intersection of creative and spiritual direction. She loves putting words and stories, written and spoken, in service of the Gospel and helping others do the same. Claire is the author of This Present Paradise: A Spiritual Journey with St. Elizabeth of the Trinity and the creator of the Let Yourself Be Loved Women’s Retreat. She serves as content editor of SpiritiualDirection.com and is the co-founder and content director of Write These Words and the PraiseWriters Catholic Writer’s Community. She lives in Phoenix with her family. Follow her—and receive a free“Be Loved” Litany—at ClaireDwyer.com .