Saint of the week: Sandra Sabattini
- Aimee Boudreaux MacIver
- May 6
- 5 min read
I want you to look at the face of the young woman in this photograph. This is what a saint looks like. This is what a saint wears. This is how a saint poses for travel photos with her friends. Look how fresh and young she is, how bright. Look at her outfit, which quite honestly I would wear today (it’s from the late ‘70s).
Had she lived, Sandra Sabattini might be sitting next to you today, maybe at church or the doctor’s office waiting room or at a work meeting. Had she lived to marry her beloved fiance, Guido, maybe their children would have been friends with yours, or maybe she’d be your mother in law or neighbor. Maybe you’d hear Sandra give a keynote about her medical mission work or maybe she and Guido would be speakers at a parish marriage retreat.
She was born in 1961 and died only 22 years later in 1984. Like so many other saints, her life could have been only a drop into the ocean of history, but holiness has a way of multiplying lives and lifetimes and life itself. Holiness is fresh water that runs over dry soil and makes it live again, makes it sing, makes flowers and fruit burst forth from all the dead corners.
Alessandra Sabattini grew up in northern Italy in a devout family. In fact, Sandra and her little brother were raised very closely—literally—to the Church: her family lived in the rectory of the parish where Sandra’s uncle was pastor. At 10, she started keeping a diary of her surprisingly deep spiritual questions and thoughts: “A life lived without God is just a way of passing time, whether it’s boring or fun, time to be filled in while waiting for death.”
But don’t imagine Sandra as some withdrawn, pious girl tucked away in the chapel and scribbling in her diary. She excelled in school; she had many friends; she was active in a local faith-based community group. The group, named for Pope John XXIII, increasingly became the center of her teenage life. Sandra spent most of her free time at community meetings and social events, and one summer she participated in a mission trip that served a camp for disabled children.
Something on that mission trip flung wide the doors of her heart. She came home bouncing with energy and dreams: I know what I want to do with my life, Mama. I want to be a doctor. I want to go to Africa and do medical mission work. She began getting up early every morning, before anyone else had awakened, and going to the church to pray in silence for an hour. In her diary, she talked to Jesus with the candor of a girl talking to her best friend: “Lord, I feel You are giving me a hand to get closer to You. You’re giving me the strength to take a step forward. I really want to accept this but first I must conquer myself, my pride, my insincerity. I have no humility and I don’t want to acknowledge it. I let myself be terribly affected by others, I’m afraid of what they may think of me. I’m inconsistent, with a great desire to revolutionise the world but then I let it subjugate me. God, are You able to accept me as I am, full of limits, fears and hopes?”
Something else soon filled Sandra’s heart: through the community group, she became close friends and then fell in love with Guido Rossi, a member who was two years older than her. Guido would later say what he most loved and admired about Sandra was her relentless joy. She told him that joy came from trusting God. When Guido proposed after about a year of dating, Sandra said yes.
They planned to get married after finishing college at Bologna University. Sandra majored in medicine. On long walks at night, they dreamed of their future together as medical missionaries. On weekends, she and Guido and their friends often volunteered at a drug rehab center. But what really caught everyone’s curiosity was Sandra and Guido’s commitment to chastity. They were a couple in love like so many others, tender and affectionate, yet their relationship proclaimed something visibly deeper than the shallow satisfaction offered by the late-’70s sexual revolution.
As Sandra’s vocation became clearer, her relationship with God deepened and her desire for sanctity surged. She wrote: “Lord, grant me the grace to never feel indispensable. Please help me empty myself in this moment, to be completely empty until no residue of false glory, of a false ‘me,’ is left.” And then later: “I did away with my ego, who was trying to be someone. And when I became no one, I began to live. It is worth dying to discover what life is.”
She didn’t want just to be good, kind, compassionate. Sandra Sabattini hungered for holiness.
On April 29, 1984, Sandra drove with Guido and another friend to a community meeting. At the exact moment she stepped out of their parked car, an oncoming vehicle roared by and smashed into her. Guido watched in horror as his smiling young fiancée instantly collapsed into a coma with severe internal injuries. Eager anticipation of mission work after college and joyful wedding plans dissolved into three days of the agonizing unknown. On the third day, Sandra Sabattini died at age 22.
Look at her face again. This is what a saint looks like: you, me, the people around us right now. Look at her eyes and hear her whisper to your own heart:“There is an attempt to make people run in vain, to cajole them with false freedoms, false goals in the name of well-being. And people are so caught up in a whirlwind of things that they turn against themselves. It’s not revolution that leads to truth, but truth that leads to revolution.
Today there are too many merely good Christians, while the world needs saints.”
Blessed Sandra Sabattini’s feast is May 4.
P.S. I know you have to know: what about Guido? Where is he now? Guido Rossi is now an ordained deacon, who lives in Italy with his wife and two children. He contributed to the process of Sandra’s cause and said, “My life was marked by Sandra with both her life and death, certainly beautiful and deep.”
Learn more about Blessed Sandra
Read her diary here (Kindle edition).
There’s a paperback version of her diary here (only in Italian).
Watch several video shorts from different sources on her life.
Here’s a Vatican News story about her beatification, heavily centered on interviews by Guido.
This news story is also good.
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