Rose's love

Love, both when it is born and when it resurrects from a lethargy that had seemed mortal, releases so much light that the whole world around it lights up.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

The words of the writer who wrote the famous novel The Scarlet Letter are well suited to his daughter Rose, a much less well-known figure until Pope Francis declared her venerable. Her life is very normal until the moment she meets a poor widow suffering from cancer who struggles with her work as a seamstress. Struck by this drama, she becomes interested in the - very harsh - fate of the poor and sick in New York society.

For them she decides to graduate as a nurse. Having separated from her alcoholic husband who will die after a short time, she deepens the path of faith in the Catholic Church that had already begun with him and she begins with her friend Alice to dedicate herself body and soul to the relief of the terminally ill. Other women joined her, and with them she founded a first community - today there are seven - the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, inspired by Saint Rose of Lima, the first canonized American woman. Now it is Rose who follows her on the path towards official sainthood. The fate of a little girl infected by the love that lights up the whole world one day expressed by the gesture of her father who, visiting a hospice for incurable and disfigured children, had forced himself to pick one up so as not to be rude to him... All this is holiness : follow love.


NP May 2024
Annamaria Gobbato