New saint gives working mothers model for holiness in modern world

Published: 2004-05-19

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- She loved skiing and mountaineering, she liked to drive fast, she juggled a career as a doctor with raising her children and being married to a traveling engineer, and now she's a saint. She is St. Gianna Beretta Molla -- a modern-day working mom whom many parents today could relate to quite easily. "Her life was a normal life. There was no outstanding thing like some of the other saints like Padre Pio, but she lived the ordinary life in an extraordinary way," said Joe Cunningham, president of the Society of Blessed Gianna, based in the Philadelphia area. "She had to juggle a lot of things in her life, being a working mom and wife, and when you read her letters to her husband you'll see that she encountered the same things we all encounter," he said in an interview May 15 with Catholic News Service. Cunningham came to Rome with about 50 other people from the United States to watch St. Gianna's May 16 canonization by Pope John Paul II. Large groups also came from Canada, Brazil, Poland and Italy.

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