Stricken with a serious illness that prevented him from communicating with the outside world, he still managed to make those around him feel his love in concrete ways. We remember him one year following his death on 15 October 2010. “Dearest Mum, finest flower in the garden of my life, light and joy of my gaze: It’s the first year that I can talk to you after eight years of silence, and I tell you that my heart swells with love for you. Let us together gather the fruits that this life will offer to us, be they sweet or sour. With much love, Marco.” These are the first words that Marco was able to say to his parents with the help of a keyboard.
Marco was fully healthy when he was born on 25 June 1992. Nevertheless, God would soon have much to ask of this young Focolare family from Vicenza. When he was three months old Marco was already affected by epilepsy and serious motor disabilities, which prevented him from communicating with the outside world.
“Accepting Marco meant sharing in each of his conquests,” his parents recount, “each step, never pretending that he was like other children. Marco was a child who could overturn you with his special smile.”
Through the keyboard, Marco began to reveal his hidden world. Inside that deformed and fragile body was a soul that the illness had rendered more sensible to God’s love and to the love for his neighbour. This discovery brought new challenges for those who were close to him.
And even if he was sometimes troubled because of how he appeared, Marco always managed to capture God’s love in each and every moment. And he knew how to be a special gift for anyone who drew near to him.
The third child in the family, Elisa, had this to say about her brother: “Of course no one is like Jesus, as kind as Jesus, but Marco is more like Jesus than anyone else I know! He plays with me, he cuddles me, and he says the most beautiful things to me.” And yet, physically, Marco couldn’t do any of these things. It was the love that he was able to transmit that allowed him to reach where he couldn’t in a material way!
Marco was actively involved in the youth movement of the Focolare. Each day he used his own sorrowful situation as an extraordinary means for actualizing the Gospel sentence: “Wherever two or more are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt 18:20). During his last encounter with his friends he encouraged them with the following words: “We are called to do God’s will, and we help each other to live it like brothers who want to walk together on the Holy Journey.”
He felt specially related to Chiara Luce Badano, the young girl from Savona who died of cancer when she was eighteen years old and was beatified on 25 September 2010. It was a great thrill for him to attend the Beatification event: “It was an experience of measureless joy, which I experience again each day if I say my yes to God by adhering to the present moment. Being like her, for me, means being completely dedicated to Jesus and making myself one with Him and His will.”
Attending the Beatification ceremony for a young person, who, like him, had lived out her heroic yes to God in sickness, was like the viaticum for his final journey.
Like Blessed Chiara Luce Badano, eighteen years of life were sufficient for him to prepare for meeting the Lord. His earthly life ended only a few days later, on the 15th of October, due to a sudden respiratory blockage.
He managed to write to his parents: “Bye Rita and bye Renzo, what a fabulous duo you are!”
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