This is the story of an exceptional girl, Lorena, who in a world starved of ideals bore witness to faith and courageous triumph over the illness and physical disability that marked her body.
She was born in Rome on November 20, 1964, into a humble, hardworking family. She lived in Rustica, a neighborhood on the city's edge where the only social institution was the parish of Our Lady of Czestochowa. From her youth, she threw herself into parish life and distinguished herself through her energy, strength of spirit, and gift for human connection.
As a child, she was diagnosed with a tumor in her leg. The first surgery was a bone graft in 1974, when Lorena was just ten years old.
After the operation, she began to walk again—at first with difficulty, then with growing confidence.
Despite her physical condition, she was determined to receive Communion from don Ugo Peressini, the parish priest and her spiritual director.
In 1976 her leg was amputated: there was no other choice—amputation or death.
In 1981 the cancer spread to her left lung, and after months of treatment, Lorena died peacefully, spared the trauma of prolonged agony.
At the parish, Lorena had joined a youth group shortly after her first surgery, sensing that Sunday Mass alone was not enough. Prayer was crucial to her—a way of letting God enter her heart and then sharing Him with others.
In 1975 she joined a parish catechism group preparing to become teachers. For Lorena, community meant everything; she saw in it a reflection of the early Church. In her diary she wrote: "I think constantly about all the members of my community, and I don't need to tell you that I care for them madly! (…) understanding that even if the body is imperfect, one can still love and be loved—I owe that to them."
Lorena offered her life to the Lord and not only overcame her physical disability but saw in the sweet burden of suffering the light of God. Again in her diary: "This is the fact (the amputation of my leg) that I consider most important, and most joyful, in my entire life."
In her diary Lorena recorded her feelings, her joys, moments of despair and moments of hope. She wrote: "I can help the world if I act with love, by the force of love, through blows of love…"
She used her diary to express her prayers, to describe incidents from parish and school life, and to reflect on social problems that touched her heart.
Lorena also left behind a recorded cassette in which she spoke, among other things, about the meaning of friendship—not for personal gain but for the good of the other.
Finally, when Lorena fully understood the inevitable course of her illness, she left us a will. Her message was a profession of faith. She asked her fellow catechists to celebrate a feast in her memory: "I wish my catechist brothers and sisters would lead the rite, singing hymns of joy because death is a liberation, a passage to eternal life."
Ten years after her death, Lorena's memory remains alive—not only among her catechist friends but among countless young people who have heard her cassette in schools, in catechism classes, in parish groups, in families. Her witness has borne fruit in radical choices made for the Lord, and in countless private acts of grace, known only to God.
Pietro Ciampi, 1994