Dear Mariolina, Al Tacconelli urged me to write to you about my father’s experience of a holy card during WWII on the frontline in France. My father’s name was Rosario and he was devoted to La Madonna del Rosario, sometimes called La Madonna di Pompeii.
In 1939, my father left Sicily for the USA when his father called his sons to America where he’d become a citizen. My grandmother and aunt remained in Sicily all through the war. Still learning English, my father was drafted into the army and was in the Normandy invasion. My father had met my mother, Francesca Guaetta, when he was taken to visit other paesani here in Philadelphia, They married in 1948.
My mother, still a teenager in high school, wrote to my father all through the war as did her own mother, Domenica Bongiovanni Guaetta. In September 1944, my father’s onomastico on October 7 was approaching and my mother was writing to him. Her mother gave her a holy card of La Madonna del Rosario that she, herself, had gotten as a child in school and told my mother to include it in the letter to my father. The prayer on the back was in Italian.
When the letter arrived on the frontlines in France, at Metz, on the border with Germany, my father opened the letter, put my mother’s letter in his pocket to savor later and began to read the prayer to the Blessed Mother on the back of the image. He was in a foxhole with another soldier, Cassidy. As soon as he finished the prayer, he put it in his shirt pocket and heard a voice telling him to get out of the foxhole, which one is never supposed to do. He obeyed the voice. He grabbed Cassidy and they ran out of the foxhole.
Within seconds a bomb hit the site where he had been reading the prayer destroying everything including all his gear. He would have been killed if he had remained. My father always told this story crediting La Madonna for saving his life. He kept the holy card all through the war. When he returned, he framed it and it hung in our dining room as proof of the miracle. Now that my parents are deceased, I have the holy card in its frame hanging in my dining room. It remains as a testament to the miracle granted my father by Our Lady of the Rosary.
– Maria Famá