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The Church’s response to the crisis of marriage must surely be to find ways to help all Catholic spouses come to know and experience a deeper conversion to Christ.
This means that the Church will need to ask great things of Catholic spouses in order that they become what they already are sacramentally; united with Christ and holy. Trials are in worldly terms failures we can’t make sense of; but in the Catholic faith trials are means by which saints might be made.
The truth is marriage comes with the Cross. For the world Crosses are meant to be overcome by elimination. For the Church Crosses are overcome by embracing them.
How spouses think about Crosses manifests a completely different set of outcomes for a marriage experiencing trials. But surely there is a Cross that is too hard? Not according to Chiara.
No one today illustrates the challenge of the Cross in marriage and family more than Chiara Corbella Petrillo.
What Chiara and Enrique each brought to their union was not only love for each other but most importantly their personal foundation of commitment in relation to Christ in His Church. Therefore they turned to God every day throughout their married life. In this way God was able to lead them through the challenges which befell them.
Chiara and Enrique met when Chiara was 18. They were engaged for 6 years. It was a difficult engagement as they fought and broke up many times.
In hindsight Chiara felt that their difficult engagement had prepared them for the trials ahead. Eventually they married and shortly after Chiara was pregnant with their first baby.
What followed for Chiara and Enrique was devastating. Their first two unborn babies were diagnosed with conditions incompatible with life. There was no medical explanation why this should have happened to these young parents.
Both babies, named Maria and Davide, died very shortly after each was born, Baptised and loved. Despite this Chiara and Enrique strangely experienced a great joy in being parents even through such a double trial.
They continued to trust in God’s plan for them. Maria and Davide were a blessing; a life once begun never ends.
Again Chiara became pregnant. This time the baby boy was well but Chiara was not. She presented with a ravaging cancer during her pregnancy and only permitted the doctors to give her a little treatment with very little pain relief. She suffered a lot.
Sadly Chiara lived for only a year after their son was born. During her final hours she told her husband that the Cross was truly ‘very sweet’.
Chiara’s testimony regarding their difficult journey was this; that they took small steps at a time and God gave them the grace to persevere.
There is no doubt to those who knew Chiara that those trials brought about a profound witness of great holiness to which many are drawn today.
What would the Church’s witness of marriage and family be like in the world today if through a deeper conversion to Christ in the Church spouses were able to make sense of their trials and persevere.
The Church is able to help spouses through to the greater joy beyond the Cross which comes with marriage. The Church is the witness to joy by encouraging its people not to abandon the Cross but find through it Christ Risen even as Chiara teaches it to be ‘very sweet’.
- Lynda Stack graduated as a distance student with a BTh from Good Shepherd College. She is now studying for a Masters at the JPII Institute in Melbourne. Lynda is married. She and her husband have two adult children who are living overseas.
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