Benedetta came home after spending her first fifty days in the hospital. Not everything has been fixed, and not everything can be fixed. But that's more than fine. I want to tell you this story—a bit confusedly, and with emotions all tangled together—a small story about faith and faithfulness. By today's standards, Benedetta should never have been born. Her life is all the more a gift, a hope, a truth, a love. What follows is a spiritual confidence, shared in friendship.
We're used to thinking that weak people, fragile people, small people, sick people—they need to have strong people beside them, people strong in every way. I've made a discovery: it's not true. Experience has taught me, biting into my flesh, that it is I who need a weak person, a fragile person, a small person, a sick person. This person has a face and a story. Her name is Benedetta. She is my daughter.
I spoke her name with pride, aloud, on the evening I baptized her. The doctors and nurses in the intensive care unit stopped their work for a moment and gathered around Benedetta's incubator to witness that singular rite of baptism administered by a father to his daughter. Seven other children were there, each protected by the warmth of their own incubators. For a few seconds, the alarms fell silent. I traced the Sign of the Cross on her small, suffering body. A moment of quiet. Then the whistle sounded—a problem with the heartbeat of Giacomo, one of the other infants.
For the "completion" of the baptism—more precisely, for the rite of welcoming a child already baptized—we chose Easter Monday: on the day of "do not be afraid," we presented her officially to the Christian community. It is the day after the Resurrection. It is the day of women, of the weakest and the smallest. It is the day of surprise that opens into hope and joy. In those first, terrifying days of life, the only part of her body I could touch without triggering an alarm was her right hand. I placed my finger in her hand, and she gripped it with her fragile strength. We stayed that way for hours, in communion. Happy simply to be together. Her trust touched my heart. I would dare say: it converted me. Our hands joined were a sign of love. I found myself praying without having decided to. I whispered a thousand Ave Marias, drawing my fingertip slowly across her tiny fingers as though they were the beads of a rosary.
I am certain that God, in those moments, held his finger in my other hand. The fatherhood I have for Benedetta—he has that for me. Benedetta asked me to choose, once and for all, life. She opened a door of hope before me. And she does not yet have the gift of speech. She has brought me into a world of suffering and smallness that I had no idea existed. In meeting day after day the parents of so many sick infants—in that place of courage that is a neonatal intensive care ward—I was shaken by the cry that breaks from their very being, their faces, their gestures, the terrible thirst for friendship that shows in their eyes.
I understood right away that Benedetta and I would move forward together, that she would help me far more than I could ever help her. I know how to do many "effective" things; but I've come to see that these don't hold the first place on the list of what Benedetta expects from me. She expects what matters: presence, relationship, love.
My role is to give her the chance to reveal her gift, her capacity to love in truth. It is extraordinary to see how Benedetta can communicate a whole new vision of the world.
I remember looking at a Nativity scene—I think it was Flemish—that made me bow my head. The two smallest figures closest to the Christ Child were a little angel and a shepherd boy: both with the characteristic features of Down syndrome. They were close to the Heart of the Lord.
We waited seven years for the gift of a child. Apparently the Lord wanted us to fill ourselves with so much love that we could welcome a child who needs love... more of it. Benedetta is a prophet. She calls us to change.
Sickness, weakness—it is a condition shadowed over today.
It is a fragile dimension of life, and perhaps we tend to see it as an unbearable mortification. Day after day, with almost brutal speed, you become only that illness, only those treatments. You come to understand, little by little, what sickness means, and you understand it by living through days of pain, fear, and loneliness.
The Lord has helped us, at every turn, to choose to live rather than merely survive. Benedetta is never alone: beside her are all the people who love her. Even when she could not see them and could not hear them, she communicated with her heart. All these people give her strength. Benedetta fights for them too. So it is that she, so small, is capable of living and of helping others live one of life's most serious experiences—an experience that belongs to all of us, and one we should never be caught wholly unprepared for.
Now comes "the time of rehabilitation," the doctors tell us. It is undoubtedly a physical fact that unfolds through the patient and often slow rebuilding of that remarkable and delicate architecture that is the human body. But rehabilitation is above all a "matter of the soul"—of hope, of the preciousness of every life and every person, who is always the dwelling place of the Lord's presence. For this reason, we all need to be rehabilitated. Surely far more than Benedetta.
An embrace—and I'm certain I need not remind you to pray for Benedetta. After all, you need only say the Ave Maria to name her... "Blessed art thou among women..."
Giampaolo