Testimony: I lesbian and abortionist, converted in Medjugorje

I remember that February day well. I was in college. Every now and then I looked out the window and wondered if Sara had already left. Sara had gotten pregnant during a quick history that ended with a positive pregnancy test. She had turned to me for help, she didn't know what to do. "It's just a lump of cells," we said. Then came that decision. I felt proud to have advised Sara to have an abortion. I firmly believed in that freedom that allows women to manage their sexuality and control motherhood, until it is completely eliminated. Children included.

Yet something broke on that February day. If I was so sure of my beliefs, why did the anniversary of that afternoon, the smell of the hospital, Sara's tears come back to me every year? Why every time I saw a newborn, did I think about that choice with deep sadness? The answer came a few years later, during a pro-life seminar in which I attended. There, I found out what an abortion really was: a murder. Or rather: what I called the right to abortion was actually a multiple murder where the mother and the child were the main victims to which the internal collateral deaths were added. I belonged to this group. By approving the abortion, I got an internal laceration that I didn't immediately realize. A small hole in the heart to which I paid no attention, too caught up in the enthusiasm of a good working career just started and the progressive atmosphere in which I was immersed.

I was a third worldist ready to promote any kind of right that could make society fairer and fairer, according to the ideas promoted by the cultural avant-garde. I was anticlerical: talking about the Church meant scandals, pedophilia, immoderate wealth, priests whose interest was to cultivate some vices. Regarding the existence of God, I considered it a pastime for retired old women. In relationships, I discovered men deeply in crisis with their masculinity, intimidated by the aggressiveness of the woman and unable to manage and make decisions. I knew women tired (including myself) of leading relationships with men like scared and immature children. I felt more and more mistrust towards the opposite sex, while I saw a strong complicity with women, which was strengthened when I started attending associations and cultural circles.

The debates and workshops were moments of confrontation on social issues, including the instability of human existence. In addition to work, precariousness had slowly begun to erode the emotional sphere. It was necessary to respond by promoting forms of love based on the fluidity of emotion and self-determination, giving free rein to those relationships capable of keeping up with the changes in society, which, according to this thought, the natural family was no longer in able to absolve. It was necessary to free oneself from the male-female relationship, considered now conflicting rather than complementary.

In such an effervescent climate, in a short time I found myself living my homosexuality. It all happened in a simple way. I felt satisfied and thus believed that I had found an inner completeness. I was sure that only with a woman by my side would I find that full realization that was the right combination of feeling, emotions and ideals. Little by little, however, that vortex of emotional sharing that was established with women under the guise of false feelings, began to consume me to fuel that sense of emptiness born from Sara's abortion.

By supporting the abortion propaganda, in fact, I had started killing myself, starting from the sense of motherhood. I was denying something that includes the mother-child relationship, but beyond. In fact, every woman is a mother who knows how to welcome and weave the bonds of society: family, friends and affections. The woman exercises an "enlarged motherhood" that generates life: it is a gift that gives meaning to relationships, fills them with content and protects them. Having torn this precious gift from me, I found myself stripped of my feminine identity and "that little hole in my heart" was created in me, which then became a chasm when I lived my homosexuality. Through the relationship with a woman, I was trying to take back that femininity that I had deprived myself of.

In the midst of this earthquake, an unexpected invitation came to me: a trip to Medjugorje. It was my sister who proposed it to me. She too was not a fan of the Church, not an extremist like me, but what was enough for her proposal to blow me away. He asked me because he had been there a few months earlier with a group of friends: he went out of curiosity and now he wanted to share with me this experience which, according to him, had been revolutionary. He often said to me "you don't know what it means" to such an extent that I accepted. I really wanted to see what was there. I trusted her, I knew she was a reasonable person and therefore something must have touched her. However, I remained of my idea: nothing good could come from religion, much less from a place where six people claimed to have apparitions which for me meant a banal collective suggestion.

With my wealth of ideas, we left. And here's the surprise. Listening to the story of who was experiencing this phenomenon (the direct protagonists, the locals, the doctors who had conducted analyzes on the visionaries), I realized my prejudices and how they blinded me and prevented me from observing reality for what it was. I left believing that in Medjugorje everything was fake simply because for me religion was fake and invented to oppress the freedom of gullible peoples. And yet, this conviction of mine had to deal with a tangible fact: there in Medjugorje there was an oceanic flow of people who came from all over the world. How could this event be fake and remain standing for more than thirty years?

A lie does not last long, after a while it emerges. Instead, listening to many testimonies, people returning home continued a journey of faith, approached the sacraments, dramatic family situations resolved themselves, sick people who healed, above all from diseases of the soul, such as what we commonly call anxieties, depressions, paranoia, which often lead to suicide. What was there in Medjugorje enough to overturn the life of that multitude? Or better: who was there? I soon found out. There was a living God who looked after his children through the hands of Mary. This new discovery took the form of listening to the testimonies of those who had gone to that place and had decided to stay to serve in some community and to tell the pilgrims how this Mother worked industriously to remove her children from restlessness. That sense of emptiness that accompanied me was a state of soul that I could share with those who had lived experiences similar to mine, but that unlike me, had stopped wandering.

From that moment, I began to ask myself questions: What was the reality that could bring me to a full realization? Did the lifestyle that I had undertaken actually correspond to my true good or was it an evil that had contributed to developing those wounds of the soul? In Medjugorje I had a concrete experience of God: the suffering of those who had lived a shattered identity was also my suffering and listening to their testimonies and their "resurrection" had opened my eyes, those same eyes that in in the past they saw faith with the aseptic lenses of prejudice. Now, that experience of God that "never leaves his children alone and above all not in pain and not in despair" that began in Medjugorje continued in my life, attending Holy Mass. I thirsted for truth and found refreshment only by drawing on that source of living water which is called the Word of God. Here, in fact, I found engraved my name, my history, my identity; little by little I understood that the Lord sets an original plan for each child, made up of talents and qualities that give uniqueness to the person.

Slowly, the blindness that obscured the reason melted away and a doubt arose in me that those rights to freedom in which I had always believed, were actually an evil disguised as a good that prevented the real Francesca from emerging in its integrity. With new eyes, I embarked on a path in which I tried to understand the truth of my identity. I participated in pro-life seminars and there I compared myself with those who had lived experiences similar to mine, with psychotherapists and priests expert on issues related to identity: finally, I was without theoretical lenses and I lived reality. In fact, here I put together the pieces of this intricate puzzle that had become my life: if before the pieces were scattered and badly stuck, now they were taking on such an order that I was starting to glimpse a drawing: my homosexuality had been the consequence of a cut identity of feminism and abortion. Just what I had believed for years could fully realize me, had killed me, selling me lies that were passed off as truth.

Starting from this awareness, I began to reconnect with my identity as a woman, taking up what had been stolen from me: myself. Today I am married and Davide walks by my side, who was close to me on this path. For each of us there is a project created by the One who is the only one able to really guide us to what we are. It is all about saying our yes as children of God, without having the presumption of killing that project with false ideological expectations that will never replace our nature as men and women.