Blessed Sandra Sabattini

Blessed Sandra Sabattini was a young laywoman from Rimini, a medical student and a member of the Pope John XXIII Community founded by Father Oreste Benzi. She died at the age of twenty-two after being struck by a car. She was engaged to be married and is sometimes called the first fiancée raised to the altars. The Church commemorates her on May 4, the day set in the apostolic letter of her beatification.

She was born on August 19, 1961, in Riccione, in the diocese of Rimini, and was baptized the next day. She came from a deeply believing family of modest means. When she was four, the family moved to the parish of Saint Jerome in Rimini, where her uncle, her mother’s brother, Father Giuseppe Bonini, was the pastor. At the age of ten, without anyone knowing, she began to write down her reflections. In one of her first notes she wrote that life without God is only a pastime, boring or pleasant, while waiting for death.

In 1974 she met Father Benzi and his community. After a stay in the Dolomites with severely disabled young people, she came back resolved to help them and told her mother that they were all worn out, but that she would never abandon those people. When the community opened a therapeutic center for young drug addicts at Igea Marina in 1980, Sandra devoted herself to this service at once, and during the summer vacation she worked there full time. In people with disabilities and in addicts she saw the face of the suffering Jesus.

After finishing secondary school in Rimini in 1980, she began to study medicine at the University of Bologna. She dreamed of going to Africa as a missionary doctor. She was engaged to Guido Rossi, also a member of the community, with whom she shared this service and planned a future together. She rose early to give the first hours of the day to God in prayer, she adored the Blessed Sacrament, and she sought the advice of a spiritual director in her choices. After her death Father Benzi published her spiritual diary.

On April 29, 1984, she was traveling with friends to a community meeting at Igea Marina. When she stepped out of the car and was waiting to cross the road, another car struck her. In a coma, she was taken to the hospital in Rimini and then to Bologna, where she died on May 2, 1984.

In 2018 Pope Francis recognized her heroic virtues, and in 2019 a miracle through her intercession: the healing of a man with metastatic colon cancer, which medical science could not explain. The beatification took place in Rimini on October 24, 2021, with Cardinal Marcello Semeraro presiding in the pope’s name. That day, after the Angelus, Francis recalled her as a joyful young woman, animated by great charity and daily prayer, who served the weakest with enthusiasm.