Saints Who Married Saints: Luigi & Maria Beltrame Quattrocchis
Patronage: Fathers, families, lawyers, married couples
Feast day: November 25
I want to open this Married Saints series with a couple who I just learned about last week. I had never even heard their names before, but now I find myself wanting them to become patrons of my own marriage. This couple is significant to this series because they were the first married couple to be beatified together. They were beatified on October 21, 2001 by Pope St. John Paul II. I am excited to introduce you to Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchis.
When learning about saints, it can be easy to forget their human nature and how much they truly resemble us. Our litany of saints is so expansive that many, while canonized, are largely unknown to us; we rely on representations of them in paintings, we learn about their lives through oral tradition rather than record, and this distance can make it easy for us to see them as legends rather than flesh and blood humans who strove for holiness.
In many ways, Luigi and Maria are “modern” saints. While they were born in the 19th Century, much of their lives (and “sainthood”) took place in the 20th Century. Luigi and Maria were married in 1905. Maria volunteered for the Red Cross. She helped refugees of World War II. Luigi studied law and worked as a civil servant; Maria was a professor of education and published writer. Luigi and Maria lived through and experienced things that are familiar to us still.
Together, they had four children (including two future priests and a future nun), and constantly created a household of faith:
The Quattrocchis’ holiness grew by attending daily Mass and reciting the Rosary as a family each evening. They regularly took part in retreats and participated in theology courses at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University. Their family participated each month in a Eucharistic vigil associated with the First Fridays devotion, as they were consecrated together as a family to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 1
While pregnant with their fourth child, Maria was diagnosed with placenta praevia and counseled by doctors to terminate the pregnancy, lest Luigi become a widower of three children. Maria refused, labor was induced, and a healthy baby girl was born. Maria maintained that God was the reason she and her daughter survived.
Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints at the time of their beatification, said the Quattrocchis “made a true domestic church of their family.”
Luigi passed away in 1951 and Maria in 1965. They are commemorated on November 25, their wedding anniversary. Three of their children Filippo, Cesare, and Enrichetta (whose cause opened in 2018), were present for their beatification. Filippo and Cesare concelebrated their beatification Mass alongside Pope St. John Paul II.
When we think of saints, we often think of heroic virtue like St. Maria Goretti, self-sacrificial love like St. Maximillian Kolbe, devotion to the poor like St. Mother Teresa, or even visions and stigmata like Sts. Padre Pio and Faustina. We are all called to this —of course— but sometimes that feels so out of reach. How do I live that way? How do I seek holiness in the “pots and pans,” as St. Teresa of Avila put it? Look no further than Luigi and Maria.
The legacy they left behind is summed up best in the words of Pope St. John Paul II: “The blessed couple lived an ordinary life in an extraordinary way.”
A second miracle attributed to this holy couple was investigated in 2014. Let’s join in prayer for its verification, which would allow Luigi and Maria to be canonized as saints.
