Blessed Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi

Blessed Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi were a Roman married couple and the parents of four children. They are the first married couple beatified together. Their joint memorial falls on November 25, their wedding anniversary, and the Roman Martyrology remembers each of them on the day of death: Maria on August 26, Luigi on November 9.

Luigi was born on January 12, 1880, in Catania. As a child he went to live with his childless aunt and uncle Quattrocchi, moved with them to Rome in 1890, and out of gratitude added their surname to his own. He studied law and spent his whole working life at the Avvocatura dello Stato, the office that represents the state in the courts; in 1946 he retired as honorary deputy Advocate General of the State. Maria Corsini was born on June 24, 1884, in Florence, and from 1893 she lived in Rome.

They were married on November 25, 1905, in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major. Filippo, Stefania and Cesare were born to them. When Maria was expecting her fourth child in 1913, the pregnancy endangered her life and the doctors advised ending it. The couple refused, and the apostolic letter of beatification stresses that Maria firmly opposed abortion. Enrichetta was born on April 6, 1914, and mother and daughter both survived. Both sons became priests; Cesare was a Benedictine and later a Trappist. Stefania entered the Benedictine nuns, and Enrichetta cared for her parents to the end.

At the center of their life were the daily Eucharist, the evening Rosary and the advice of wise spiritual directors. John Paul II recalled that they taught their children to judge everything “from the roof up,” as they liked to say. Maria wrote articles and books on education; in one of them, “L’ordito e la trama” (1953), she described her life with her husband.

Luigi was active in Catholic scouting and in Catholic Action, and as a stretcher-bearer of UNITALSI he accompanied the sick on pilgrimages. Maria was a Franciscan tertiary, was a member of Women’s Catholic Action, traveled with the sick to Lourdes and Loreto, and in 1937 completed a Red Cross nursing course. During the First World War she supported wounded soldiers in the hospitals of Rome. During the Second World War the couple helped to hide people hunted by the Nazis, Jews among them.

Luigi died of a heart attack on November 9, 1951, in Rome. Maria outlived him by fourteen years. She died on August 26, 1965, while on vacation at Serravalle di Bibbiena in Tuscany, in the house her husband had built for her.

The cause of beatification opened in 1994 in the Vicariate of Rome. John Paul II beatified them on October 21, 2001, on the twentieth anniversary of the apostolic exhortation Familiaris consortio, in the presence of three of their children. He said then that the blessed couple lived an ordinary life in an extraordinary way and that the path of holiness traveled together, as a couple, is possible.