Bl. Chiara Badano

Chiara Badano was born on 29 October 1971 at Sassello, a village in the hills of Liguria in northern Italy, the long-awaited only child of Ruggero and Maria Teresa Badano after eleven years of marriage. At the age of nine she encountered the Focolare Movement and embraced its spirituality of unity wholeheartedly, joining its young members, the Gen; the movement's foundress, Chiara Lubich, later gave her the name Chiara Luce, "Clare Light." By every account she was an ordinary and cheerful teenager who loved tennis, swimming, singing, and her friends, and who set herself with quiet stubbornness to make the love of Jesus visible in small daily choices rather than in anything extraordinary.

In 1988 a sharp pain in her shoulder while she was playing tennis proved to be the first sign of osteogenic sarcoma, an aggressive bone cancer diagnosed the following year. Through two years of surgeries, chemotherapy, and advancing paralysis she refused morphine in order to remain lucid, saying that she wished to offer her suffering consciously with Jesus, and she repeated the words that became her own: "If you want it, Jesus, I want it too." She asked that her funeral be celebrated not as a farewell but as a wedding, and her last words to her mother were, "Goodbye. Be happy, because I am." She died at Sassello on 7 October 1990, aged eighteen. She was beatified on 25 September 2010 in a rite celebrated at the Shrine of Our Lady of Divine Love outside Rome under Pope Benedict XVI. She is honored as Blessed and not yet as a saint, and has become one of the most widely loved modern models of holiness for young people.