Blessed Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi

Luigi Beltrame Quattrocchi (1880-1951) and his wife Maria Corsini Beltrame Quattrocchi (1884-1965) were a Roman Catholic couple of the twentieth century — a lawyer and a homemaker, parents of four children, three of whom entered religious life. They lived ordinary married life with extraordinary depth: daily Mass together, the Rosary as a family, hospitality to those in need, fidelity to one another and to the faith through the difficulties of two world wars and the political upheavals of mid-century Italy.

What distinguishes them in the history of the Church is that on October 21, 2001 — the twentieth anniversary of John Paul II's apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio on the Christian family — they became the first married couple in history to be beatified together. The Pope explicitly held them up as a model: the path to holiness in marriage is real, available, and worth being recognized officially by the Church.

For Catholic couples, Luigi and Maria offer something none of the older married saints can quite offer: a marriage lived in conditions recognizable as our own. They wrestled with the same modern pressures, the same anxieties about children, the same temptations to comfort and self-protection that every couple faces. They prayed together; they served together; they grew old together. They modeled, in the most ordinary terms, what John Paul II called "the universal call to holiness in the lay state" — the conviction that married life itself is one of the great schools of sanctity.

Their cause for canonization is ongoing. They are buried beside one another in the Roman shrine of the Madonna del Divino Amore — together in death as they were in life.