It was brutally cold that January Sunday nine years ago, when our story began.
We bundled up our children and headed to Mass. On the church steps, a family of Roma were asking passersby insistently for help. Most people gave them a few coins. Looking at those small children, half-dressed and shivering, begging—we couldn't stay indifferent. The contrast with our own two children, warm and fed and protected, was too sharp to ignore.
Our first thought was to hand over some money and move on. But then we thought about the Mass we were about to attend, about Christ identifying himself with the poor we would encounter there. We had an idea: share our Sunday dinner with them, and clothe them as best we could.
The Roma accepted. They would meet us afterward. But when we returned to the square at the appointed time, no one was there. Months passed. The memory faded. We were left with a nagging sense that we had failed to answer their need adequately.
That summer, my wife and I began to talk about wanting another child.
One September day, we came across a desperate appeal in a magazine. A small handicapped girl had been abandoned. We looked at each other—she would be ours. But we felt the weight of what it would mean to expand our understanding of parenthood.
From the moment we took the first step toward her, we felt she was already ours, even as the bureaucracy wound forward. Finally we met our daughter at the institution. The social worker was surprised by our enthusiasm. She warned us about the harm we would do if we changed our minds and returned her.
From the moment she entered our home, this small girl became—despite all the sacrifices and struggles—an incomparable gift to us, and a hymn to life itself. We thank God for her every day. She has been with us for nine years now. But the greatest emotion came a few months after she arrived. During a routine visit, the social worker told us she had learned something about our daughter's birth. She is the child of a Roma woman. She was born on that very cold January Sunday—the day we had decided to invite those wanderers to dinner.
—Virginio and Marisa, 1985