Chiara Badano was the only child of a small Ligurian truck-driver's family at Sassello in the Apennine foothills above the Riviera. From childhood she was active in the Focolare Movement (the Catholic lay movement founded by Chiara Lubich at Trent in 1943), and made the conscious decision at fourteen to dedicate her life to the movement. She was an ordinary Ligurian teenager — tennis enthusiast, ordinary high-school student, fashion-conscious, with a wide circle of friends.
In summer 1988, at sixteen, while playing tennis at Sassello, she experienced a sudden severe pain in her shoulder. The diagnosis a few weeks later was osteogenic sarcoma — bone cancer, with a poor prognosis for someone her age. She underwent extensive surgery (the partial removal of the right scapula), then full-spectrum chemotherapy. The cancer metastasized through her vertebrae. By spring 1989 she had become permanently paralysed in both legs.
Through the remaining two years of her life — at home in Sassello, attended by her parents — Chiara underwent the standard cycle of chemotherapy, painful spine procedures, and progressive systemic failure. Her response was documented in remarkable detail by her parents, friends, the Focolare youth movement, and the surrounding Sassello parish. She refused morphine for the last weeks of her life so that she could remain mentally clear; she preserved a sustained personal joy and apostolic outreach to the young Focolare members who came to visit her; she gave away her possessions one item at a time over the last six months. Chiara Lubich, founder of Focolare, gave her the religious nickname 'Luce' ('Light') — by which she is now generally known.
She died at her parents' home in Sassello on October 7, 1990 at eighteen. The cult was immediate; the Vatican opened her cause in 1999. Beatified by Benedict XVI at Rome in 2010 — the first beatification of a contemporary teenager and the model that would lead to the 2020 beatification and 2025 canonization of the slightly younger Carlo Acutis (already in the catalogue).