Video: 18 yr. old. on way to sainthood. Beatification this Sept. 25, 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GxP4z2-MLA&feature=player_embedded#!


April 22, 2010. The Italian youth Chiara Luce Badano is an example for many youths and the sick despite her death at only 18 years of age. Her heroic way of facing cancer didn’t just surprise her parents and her friends. On September 25 she will be proclaimed blessed.


Chiara was born in 1971. Her father was a truck driver and her mother a housewife. A sports fan, those who knew her described her as an open girl, concerned for others and very close to her parents. The three were members of the Focolare Movement.

“Her mother says Chiara and her would exchange small acts of kindness. They kept track by collecting pebbles in their pockets. In the end Chiara always had more pebbles than her mother .”

“I have seen all the coherence and the radicalism of Chiara’s life in the life of her parents.”

At age nine she found the spirit of the Focolare Movement in a festival celebrated in Rome. It caught the attention of the Badano family, which shared everything. From this moment, they joined the movement, and the young Chiara and the founder, Chiara Lubich, formed a great friendship, which is reflected in the letters they sent each other.

“Chiara Luce is the name that Chiara Lubich would give her after the long correspondence they had since she was a child. She got this name in the last period of her life.”

“Chiara began to write her letters addressed to Chiara Lubich with ‘hi mom’, which shows that for her she was like a mother. And Chiara has known God through the movement founded by Chiara Lubich.”

One day, the 17-year old was playing when she felt a sharp pain in her back. After several tests, the doctors thought it was a problem with her spinal cord. It turned out to be a malignant tumor. When they diagnosed her, it was very advanced. She had two operations, without success.

“In the last moments she refused morphine that could have lessened her physical pain, because she entered into another logic, the one to offer everything. At one moment she said, the only thing left is the pain, and if I can’t offer this, what can I offer?”

“She got sick when she was a teenager and died while she was young, but always trying to live through difficulties with a smile, trying to be love for everyone else.”

Benedict XVI has recognized as a miracle through Chiara Luce’s intercession the extraordinary cure of an Italian boy with a grave illness. Now the 18-year-old girl will be raised to the altar on September 25.

source: http://www.romereports.com/palio/modules.php?t=Chiara-Luce-Badano--Eighteen-year-old-girl-of-the-Focolare-Movement-will-be-beatified-in-September&name=News&file=article&newlang=english&sid=1990