In an interview with the Italian magazine ‘Maria con te’, journalist Marina Nalesso from RAI’s Tg2 news program and new spokesperson for the Minister of Culture, Sangiuliano, talks about her bond with the Virgin Mary and the rosary she wears around her neck: ” I will never take it off. Everything was born from a deep conversion”
“Jesus grabbed me by the hair. I was so desperate that I even he had begun to attend Buddhist meetings trying to find peace there“. It is the testimony of faith of the Rai journalist Marina Nalesso, presenter of the Tg1 and Tg news programs and since last November 18 spokesperson for the Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano, offered in an extensive interview with the weekly Maria with you, on newsstands in Italy starting Thursday, December 8. Marina also recounts why she will not give up the rosary beads that she wears with pride and conviction around her neck, even when she has been overwhelmed by controversy for wearing them on camera.
It was 2016, she was presenting her first newscast on RAI. The rosary of controversy returned to the fore in 2019 and, more recently, at the end of October of this year. Always the same history. When Marina Nalesso appears in Tg2 with his rosary, begins a carousel of attacks on social networks, more and less politicized comments, everyone has an opinion. On the other side is her. She does not back down an inch and explains to Maria with you: “I never, ever take it off and I have no intention of doing so in the future. It has never crossed my mind, not for a second, to take it off or hide it before going on air. Why would I? Talk about my love for Mary and Jesus. From time to time they find out that I am wearing the rosary around my neck and the controversy breaks out again, but I am absolutely calm. The Virgin has entered my life by the hand of my interior awakening. I often ask him to give me strength not to act on impulse, not to retaliate against the actions of others, especially in circumstances of aggression or prevarication.”
The journalist also recounts her eventful path of conversion: “After the meeting with Father Antonio, the RAI chaplain, another meeting came to change my life, this time definitely,” she says. “A friend invited me to her birthday dinner and there I met another priest, young and frank, with whom I spoke for hours. An enlightening dialogue, dazzling I would dare to say, well opened wide the doors of faith and love for Christ. It is as if, out of nowhere, my heart, my brain opened up and, in the same way, I began to feel the need to go to church, to pray, to go to mass every day. Now if I don’t, I feel bad: I have to go to massEven if it’s early in the morning before going to work. If I didn’t meet Jesus every day, I couldn’t live“.
After this process, his Marian devotion also flourished: “Mary came hand in hand with a growing desire to share, to pray with someone. And the void was filled, once again, thanks to the encounter with a consecrated person: a Franciscan friar, Father Cristoforo Amanzi, founder of a community, the Franciscan Fraternity that bears the name of Mary Mother of Reconciliation and Peace, whose spirituality I fully embraced. Thanks to them, to the brothers and sisters who are part of it, after Jesus I discovered Mary…”.
Finally, it reveals that his “place of the heart” is Medjugorje: “It’s my second home. I went there for the first time in 2007 with Father Antonio, the RAI chaplain, and I go back every time I can, also because my fraternity, to which I belong as a lay person, has a house of spirituality there” .