Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Andrea Bocelli tells his story

If you don't know who he is, he is a fairly famous Italian musician, blinded early on by glaucoma. Here he is talking during one of his concerts:

The video was made over a year ago but was only recently circulated on various websites.

Bocelli, who is blind, didn't expect the fuss over his testimony but voiced his pro-life stance clearly in a recent interview with Italian newspaper Il Foglio, as reported by LifeSiteNews.com.

"Because of my personal convictions as a devout Catholic, I am not only fighting against something, I am fighting for something – and I am for life," the world-famous tenor said.

In the video, Bocelli does not make arguments defending the dignity of human persons in the womb, but rather tells a short story of how he came to be.

His mother, he recounted, was hospitalized while pregnant for what was thought to be a simple attack of appendicitis. The doctors applied some ice on her stomach and after the treatments were complete, they advised the mother to abort the child.

"They told her it was the best solution because the baby would be born with some disability," Bocelli explained in the video, which was translated for English-speaking viewers.

But his mother decided not to abort the child and Andrea was born on Sept. 22, 1958.
"Maybe I'm [biased] but I can say that it was the right choice," he said.

Bocelli explained to Il Foglio that he recorded the video at the request of his friend, Father Richard Frechette, a missionary who works with children in Haiti, to raise funds for a new home, as reported by LifeSiteNews.com. He was asked to provide hope to struggling mothers.

"I hope this could encourage many mothers that sometimes find themselves in difficult situations – in those moments when life is complicated but want to save the life of their baby," he said in the video.

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Pray for the Canonization of Blessed William Josph Chaminade

"Jesus deigned to assume a form resembling ours, and we should in turn shape ourselves to his likeness, conform our morals to his, our inclinations to his inclinations, our life to his life."
Blessed William Josph Chaminade