Carlota Nobile
Carlotta Nobile (Rome, 20th December 1988 - Benevento, 16th July 2013) is known for her courageous testimony in the fight against cancer and for the profound experience of Faith reached in the last months of her life, which ended only at the age of 24 years.
She was an art historian, violinist, writer and Italian blogger.
Polyhedral personality of artist and scholar, among the most appreciated young Italian violinists of her time.
Carlotta’s life had an unforeseen, mysterious epilogue. He acquired, as a gift from God, a special characteristic of being “for us”.
Carlotta was not a practitioner, she had never joined associations, groups, movements. She was part of the immense amount of people and young people who “are far away”. Faith was not a part of daily life for her. She was not against it. She has never been expressed in negative terms compared to the Church. She was external, though not foreign. She stood outside the fence, in the suburbs, perhaps the most difficult, those of culture and art, and then of the disease. The populated suburbs where most people live, especially the young.
The approach to a holy life, to a life in Christ, to a life in the true Church and to a path for humanity, takes place for her through an existential journey.
Carlotta represents the sanctity of the distants.
The preaching that changes a life.
On March 13th, 2013, Pope Francis is elected. On 19th March the settlement takes place. On March 24th, the Pope held the first homily in St. Peter’s. It is Palm Sunday, World Youth Day. A preaching that changes a life: that of Carlotta.
The Pope in that sermon asks the young to bring the Cross with joy. “I am proud to be able to carry my cross at the age of twenty-four, if you are with me! Thank you sir”.
Carlotta then decides to confess after many years. The following Good Friday in the early afternoon the only church that is open is that of San Giacomo in Augusta in via del Corso. The parish priest had been at lunch with Pope Francis the day before. He had told him: “the doors of the Church ... keep the doors of the Church open”. This is why Don Giuseppe, despite his exhaustion, had kept the church open uninterruptedly on Friday ... Carlotta reconciles.
Carlotta in her existential quest has had the grace to meet people who have not forgotten about love in the Church. They welcomed her with love and she no longer felt distant. The fence was open; it is the simple pastoral care of the “open door”.
Don Giuseppe wrote to the Pope to encourage him in his mission and to tell him that he was already harvesting beautiful fruits in Carlotta’s faith. The Pope calls him on the phone, thanks him, asks Carlotta and asks to pray for him.
The story of Carlotta’s faith suggests the importance of giving space to a “pastoral care of occasions”, of real contacts, of meaningful relationships, where the embrace is sincere and does not pretend to fit into patterns. It is at the bottom of the “revolution of tenderness”, of a profound missionary renewal in the Church that proceeds “from person to person”.
For Carlotta, the light has arrived. In an instant, the infinite.
“And in a moment you understand that it was precisely that cancer to GUARANTEE THE SOUL, to bring order in the true essentiality of your life, to give you back the Faith, the hope, the trust, the abandonment, the awareness of finally having become for a lifetime you did everything to be and never were: a SERENA woman! Understand that it was cancer that finally allowed you to love yourself in an unconditional way, with all your strengths and all your limitations, to enjoy every minute, to savor every moment, every smell, every taste, every sensibility, every word, every sharing, every smallest fragment of infinity condensed into a most banal and precious instant. Understand that it was cancer, with its torment, its aggressiveness, its harshness that finally brought you LIGHT.
Tac. And then your life changes.
This is. And it’s a moment, a moment that solves ... EVERYTHING!
I am healed in the soul. In an instant, on an ordinary day, upon awakening from a crisis.
I opened my eyes and I was another. And this is a miracle”.
Today Carlotta has become a credible witness for young university students and students of the Conservatories of Music; for women; for artists, especially for musicians; for the sick, especially for those with cancer.
His mission seems to respond to a design superior to her. It coincides with the beginning of the papacy of Pope Francis. It appears as one of the first fruits of the new pastoral style of the pontiff, who invites us to “open the doors” and “to carry the cross”. She herself becomes a witness.
Freely taken from the book: Filomena Rizzo, Paolo Scarafoni, In un attimo l’infinito. Carlotta Nobile, Edizioni Paoline, Milano 2017.
To find out more visit: https://www.carlottanobile.it/en/.