The suffering of newborns and children remains an enormous mystery. Theologians, philosophers, biblical scholars, mystics, religious thinkers—for all they have said and written about it, none has managed to explain why God permits the unacceptable physical and spiritual suffering of the smallest among us. If God is love, how can He conceive, how can He allow a child to fall ill or be maimed, tortured, abused, and killed? How can He permit the horrors we read about in the news? Or the senseless suffering of infants in neonatal units or comfort care centers, children with conditions incompatible with life?
Then one day, a warm flash of light came to me—almost by chance—through reading the diary of a young mother, Silvia Fasana. In Giacomo, My Little Missionary (Itaca, 2017, 135 pages, €13), she traces the months—as long as a school year for her three older daughters—between learning of a new pregnancy and Giacomo's death, lived for only eight hours. In between: the discovery of the fetus's grave malformation, the diagnosis (the child would not survive birth), pressure from doctors and midwives to abort, solitude, pain—preparing for a new birth while also preparing for a newborn's funeral—the schizophrenia of wanting to know the child growing inside her while knowing that meeting would precede goodbye by mere moments.
There is a remarkable scene in this diary. After receiving diagnoses in Dubai (where Silvia lives with her husband and daughters), the couple returned to Italy to confirm the severity of the malformation incompatible with life that afflicted the unborn child. The confirmation came, but "the moment the doctor placed the ultrasound probe on my belly, she said: 'It's a boy! And apart from his condition, he's doing fine.'"
Until that moment, the other doctors Silvia had consulted had treated his condition as so grave that they believed death would be better than birth—so grave that they urged the mother to abort rather than carry the pregnancy to term. But Dr. Vergani did more than look at the malformation. She looked at the rest of him too.
For Dr. Vergani, Giacomo was not his malformation. Giacomo was a fetus with a malformation.
The ultrasound scene is not an answer to the painful question we ask God each time we hear of and witness the suffering of children. But it is a warm flash of light, a gentle balm that helps us not lose our minds before that great Why.
Giulia Galeotti, 2017