Happy Feast of St. Gianna and an Anniversary!

Isn’t the above picture great? One of these days I need to get around to ordering a portrait of St. Gianna from Portraits of Saints for my home. (What a great shop – I love their images!) [Update: I finally did order one last year (2017), and now it hangs in my kitchen!)

It’s the feast day of this blog’s patroness, St. Gianna Beretta Molla, and the one-year anniversary of the launch of this blog! St. Gianna, pray for us!

I haven’t been as prolific a blogger as I’d hoped (darn real life getting in the way), but our Facebook group is still going strong – we have over 1,300 members now – and I remember most days to post something to the blog’s Facebook page.

In other news, I discovered something tremendously exciting this morning. I’ve always wished that I knew about St. Gianna when I was confirmed in 2003 (she was “Blessed Gianna” at the time, as she wasn’t canonized until 2004), because if I had I would have taken her name as my confirmation name.

However, today being St. Gianna’s feast day, I was curious and decided to look up the etymology of her name. (BTW, shout out to two fantastic sites for name geeks — Behind the Name and Sancta Nomina.)

Guess what I found out? “Gianna” is another form of “Joanna”! I was named after my favorite saint, and one of the patronesses of working mothers, twenty-four years before she was canonized! Somehow, I don’t think that’s a coincidence (especially since family lore has it that my parents had another name for me in mind throughout my mother’s pregnancy, and only decided to name me JoAnna after I was born). Thanks, Holy Spirit!