Blessed Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi, the married couples, are the patron saints of the 10th World Meeting of Families taking place in Rome on June 22-26.
The Catholic Church will venerate them inside St. Peter’s Basilica this week during the World Meeting of Families in Rome.
The Italian couple was married for 45 years, enduring two world wars together and nurturing their four children’s vocations in service of the Church amid unprecedented difficulties facing Europe.
Among four children, both sons became priests in the 1930s and went on to concelebrate the beatification Mass of their parents with John Paul II in 2001.
Their eldest son, Father Tarcisio Beltrame, a Benedictine monk, and his younger brother Father Paolino, a Trappist. Both of them risked their lives to secretly work with the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Italy in World War II, while the Beltrame Quattrocchi family’s apartment in Rome served as a hiding place for fugitives and Italians with Jewish heritage.
A living relative of the Beltrame Quattrocchi family says that he has documents from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) confirming the sons’ collaboration in the Resistance movement, which was made even riskier by the fact that the family’s apartment was located right by the headquarters of the German command in Rome.
“If they had been discovered they would have all been immediately shot,” Francesco Beltrame Quattrocchi told.
The Beltrame Quattrocchis’ daughters also enthusiastically served the Church. Their eldest daughter, Stefania, entered a Benedictine monastery as a nun in 1927. And the youngest child in their family, Enrichetta Beltrame Quattrocchi, was a lay consecrated woman who has been declared venerable.