Modern-Day Saint With Bucks County Shrine Being Recognized During WMOF
By Mark Abrams
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - When the World Meeting of Families opens in Philadelphia later this month, two saints in the Catholic church - one of whom is recognized in a shrine in the Archdiocese - will serve as patrons of the gathering.
Pope St. John Paul II, who visited Philadelphia in 1979, and St. Gianna Beretta Molla, who was canonized by John Paul II in 2004 as "Mother of the Family," were selected as role models for the gathering more than a year ago.
St. Gianna is honored at a shrine housed in Nativity of Our Lord parish along Street Road in Warminster.
Robert White is president of the St. Gianna Society. He says the Italian wife, mother, and pediatrician who suffered complications as a result of a tumor, gave her life to save her child back in 1962:
"Before she went in to deliver this child, she told the doctor, the surgeon and her husband - 'if there's a choice between me and that child, I demand it you save that child's life.' Seven days after giving birth to a 10-pound baby girl, she died of septic peritonitis."
White says that child will speak during the World Meeting of Families Congress and St. Gianna's other surviving children will greet people at a booth inside the Pennsylvania Convention Center where relics of their mother will be on display.
