“Everything proceeds as planned”: a novel that defends life without raising its voice…

Gaia, protagonist of

“Everything proceeds as planned,” a tunnel became a bridge thanks to
Gianna Beretta Molla

, written by Cecilia Galatolo, is a good girl, who is quite serious and
conscientious. She studies medicine, dreams of one day being married, and
is firm in her pro-life beliefs. Then suddenly, everything she was so sure
about came crashing down. The world seemed to literally fall on her.
Disappointed by her fiancé’s, she throws herself into her studies. One
evening she is taking a break from her studies, and she stupidly “lets
go”… Shortly thereafter, she finds herself single, halfway through her
university career, with a relationship left behind her and an unforeseen
pregnancy to face.

When abortion is proposed as the “only solution”

Everything and everyone seems to show her there is only one-way forward: to
interrupt “the process that, unintentionally, began within her,” – to have
an abortion and “move on.”

“One quick operation and everything will be just as before.” But Gaia isn’t
able to. She thinks that nothing will ever be the same as before. She
believes that there is already a life in her, someone who deserves to be
welcomed, even if she does not have the strength to do it, even if she does
not know where to begin to accept something that would cost so much.

She cannot begin to change around all her plans for an unwanted child – for
a child that at that moment in her life should never have been there. So
what now?

When you sincerely seek the good, the good arrives

In the ward that Gaia calls “the most useless of the hospital” (the
chapel), she will have an unexpected and decisive encounter with a person
who will change her life.

Little by little, thanks to this person, she will come to understand her
situation in a completely different way. In a way we could say it was
“providential” that the first motherly saint of our times, Gianna Beretta
Molla enters Gaia’s life. Saint Gianna, in order to give life to her fourth
child, chose to sacrifice herself in order to carry that child to term,
dying just a week after giving birth.

A painful decision, but one that in the biographies of Saint Gianna is
accompanied by a very strange joy, a fruit of a certainty: that God, in His
Providence, turns everything into good.

Thanks to these encounters, Gaia’s mind and heart will begin to change. She
will come to know Jesus Christ and nothing will be the same as before…

If true stories weight more than a thousand words

“The world needs witnesses more than teachers,” said Paul VI. And how can
we deny that he is right? Good examples, the stories of life, the concrete
choices, weigh more than a thousand words or theories.

People, in order to believe, need to see that ideas come to life, that
there is coherence between words and actions. And to be impressed by a
choice they need to see its beauty.

Gianna Beretta Molla did not choose to die; she was not a person who
despised life. On the contrary, she loved it very much. But for this very
reason she refused to end another’s life, especially a life that belonged
to her child and could come into this world only thanks to her.

If each of us deserves infinite love

Gianna knew that each one of us is worthy of infinite love…each person is
unique and precious. Each one of us has an immeasurable value.

Whoever does not recognize that the other has a right to unconditional
love, whoever he might be, probably does not believe it because he does not
firstly recognize it within himself. He himself does not yet know or
remember that he is a special creature, so special that he deserves care
and respect from the first moment he begins to live. Without exception.

This great saint, canonized in 2004 by St. John Paul II, knew that every
human life is worth more than anything else in the world.

Gianna’s story continues to bear fruit around the world

Some might think that there was not a happy ending in Gianna’s story: her
children were left without a mother, and her husband a widower. But as her
husband Peter, a man of great faith, said to the daughter born thanks to
his wife’s brave choice, God chose to call Gianna to do good in many parts
of the world, to give Gianna to so many people who needed her.

Among them is Gaia, our protagonist. A fictional character, of course, but
who probably really exists and at this moment she is deciding between her
own plans and the life of a child.

For every real Gaia, Gianna has a message of hope: “Trust in God’s
Providence and you will be happy. Because God loves you and cares for you.
Love, open your hands to Him, always choose life, choose to love even when
it costs and God will never abandon you.