Lisa Gigliotti shares powerful story of faith, perseverance in the face of hardship during 47th annual Respect Life Benefit Dinner
TROY — Supporters of life gathered April 2 at the San Marino Club in Troy for the 47th annual Respect Life Benefit dinner, co-sponsored by the Michigan State Council of the Knights of Columbus and Right to Life of Michigan.
The annual dinner will help support a pro-life advertisement campaign sponsored by Right to Life of Michigan, set to air in the late spring and early summer. The campaign consists of several pro-life video ads that will share a message of hope to women considering abortion: that choosing life isn't just an option, but the best option, pro-life leaders said.
“These ads reach women exactly where they are on streaming services like Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock and Netflix,” said Brad Smith, development coordinator for Right to Life of Michigan. “Each ad invites a woman to explore and make a choice for life for her unborn child. Many of the ads end with a hotline to call or text so that they can get help and get connected with a pregnancy center in their community … We are going to offer them hope and a choice they will not forget: life.”
Prior to dinner, the evening’s master of ceremonies, Fr. Mario Amore, introduced the room to Archbishop Edward J. Weisenburger, the newly appointed archbishop of Detroit and one of the benefit dinner’s guests of honor.
Archbishop Weisenburger blessed the meal and shared a few words of gratitude, thanking Right to Life of Michigan and the Knights of Columbus for their efforts in the pro-life movement.
Archbishop Weisenburger, a fourth-degree Knight, said he was active in the Knights of Columbus in his previous dioceses in Kansas and Arizona, and that his father was a former state officer with the Knights.
“I look forward to being involved (with the Knights) here,” Archbishop Weisenburger said, adding that the Knights' financial support helped fund his own vocational formation. “I don't know if I would be here today if it were not for the Knights.”
The archbishop expressed his support for the ongoing efforts of the local pro-life movement, adding respect and love for all human life is crucial to healing a world in pain.
“Our very broken, shattered world will not be healed until we truly have a very real appreciation, love and reverence for all of human life, from conception until natural death,” Archbishop Weisenburger said. “You all are on the front lines, and I deeply appreciate that. Let us continue the good work because God is with us, and the Holy Spirit will breathe within us, and good things for life will unfold.”
Following dinner, Fr. Amore introduced the keynote speaker, Lisa K. Gigliotti, Esq., a decades-long leader in the work to safeguard Michigan from physician-assisted suicide. Gigliotti has served in many roles, including as a policy advisor for the Michigan Senate and government, as an advocate for people with disabilities, and a voice for improving end-of-life care.
Gigliotti’s advocacy stems from her own lived experience with severe rheumatoid arthritis and myasthenia gravis, she said.
When she was a 20-year-old pre-med student, Gigliotti said she began to experience intense pain in her joints, which was then diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis. Her physician told her that her dreams of becoming a doctor one day wouldn't happen, and she would need to rely on the care of others throughout her life.
“I left straight from there and went to the matriarch of our family, Nonna — that means 'grandmother' in Italian,” Gigliotti said. “I sat next to her on the couch, and I told her how this person had condemned me and told me that I would never fulfill the plan God and I had together. And Nonna didn't say anything, she just sat holding my hand, and then quietly, almost in a whisper, she said, 'Coraggio, Lisa, coraggio.'”
Gigliotti took that word — meaning "courage" in Italian — to heart, and finished her undergraduate degree. However, as the severity of the rheumatoid arthritis took its toll, Gigliotti was forced to moved in with her Nonna and mother and began relying on a wheelchair.
“I needed them to feed me, to bathe me, to toilet me, but I never felt the loss of dignity because providing those basic human and humane acts, that’s what you do for people that you love,” Gigliotti said. “It was beautiful, if you think about it. And they swarmed the heavens with prayers that I be healed.”
Gigliotti began to improve and soon could get in her wheelchair by herself and propel herself around the apartment. However, Gigliotti’s life was about to drastically change again: One day, she received a phone call that her mother and Nonna had been in a car accident.
Neither of them survived.
“I thought I knew pain. I thought I knew more intense pain than most people,” Gigliotti said. “Nothing, nothing hurt as much as the loss of my mother and my grandmother. You have to understand these were the women who cared for me every day. They brought the outside world to me, and they were my spiritual sisters, and they were gone.”
At her mother’s funeral, Gigliotti was determined to give her eulogy. However, as she began to speak, her words became garbled, and she knew something was seriously wrong. She soon began to experience double vision and would choke on her food, all leading to the diagnosis of a second debilitating illness, myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease that causes weakness in voluntary muscles.
Having lost her support system and caregivers, Gigliotti had no choice but to move into a nursing home to receive treatment for her illnesses. Still, in her 20s, the move took what little agency Gigliotti had left.
“Worst of all for me was in the evenings when the nurses would close the lights in my room and close the doors, and (I could hear) the cries of people with dementia, and I was left alone with my thoughts,” Gigliotti said. “And it was in the middle of one of those dark nursing home nights, I remember just calling out to God, I said, ‘God, help me. Help me. I'm starting to slip down; I can't grab anything anymore. Help me.’
“In the quiet still of that nursing home, I heard a quiet, small voice in the back of my mind, and it was my Nonna’s voice, and she was saying, ‘Coraggio, Lisa, coraggio,’” Gigliotti said.
“Finally, I understood the power behind what she had told me. She came from a peasant village where people weren't educated and they were poor, but they were rich in courage and in faith. Those women lost their sons, they lost many babies, they lost their husbands, and they kept going with coraggio and faith. And if they had that coraggio and faith in them, so did I. And I took that coraggio, and I was able to get start walking again and get out of the nursing home,” she said.
The work of advocating for the vulnerable, the disabled and the unborn requires moral courage, Gigliotti concluded.
“We need to build ourselves an armor, and not just any armor; we need to build ourselves in Ephesians 13 armor,” Gigliotti said. “I need everyone to slap on that belt of truth, hold up that shield of faith, hold high that sword of spirit, the word of God.
“I would like to end tonight with what I call one of my banners of moral courage," she added. "And that banner is a beautiful poem from our blessed Mother Teresa. And it goes like this: ‘Let us reach out to the poor, the lonely, the unwanted, and let us never be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.’ And with that, I say, God says, 'Courage.'"
