Your Names Are Written in Heaven
142 pages
February 18, 2025
AVAILABLE NOW! In Your Names Are Written in Heaven, veteran Italian journalist Davide Perillo tells the inspiring story of Rose Busingye and “her women” with clarity, compassion, and insight.
| Hardcover | ISBN 9781639821822 | $35.00 |
| Paperback | ISBN 9781639821815 | $19.00 |
| eBook | ISBN 9781639821839 | $12.99 |
on Goodreads
AVAILABLE NOW! In the 1990s, a young Ugandan Catholic nurse named Rose Busingye began working in the slums of Kampala with the many women there suffering from HIV/AIDS. Many of them were refugees from civil war in the north, having been raped, beaten, forced to kill in order not to be killed, to steal children in the hope of one day returning to see their own children.
Even though Rose brought food and medicine to them, she often discovered that the women had not taken their medications, so sunk were they in despair and a lack of self-worth. She was on the verge of abandoning everything, when she received an invitation to stay for some time in Italy. It was from Fr. Luigi Giussani, the Italian priest who had founded Communion and Liberation, the movement to which Rose also belongs. After those months spent in Milan, she returned to Uganda with a renewed desire to share with these women what she herself had experienced: the infinite value of her life. Of every life.
Soon things began to change. Out of that change grew Meeting Point International, an organization led by many of the same women Rose had ministered to. In time, new efforts arose, including schools and orphanages—projects that continue to embody Pope Francis’s injunction to go to the margins. In Your Names Are Written in Heaven, veteran Italian journalist Davide Perillo tells the inspiring story of Rose Busingye and “her women” with clarity, compassion, and insight.
What Others Are Saying
The story told in this book seems to me a cheerful testimony of the “Church that goes out,” that Pope Francis never tires of indicating, as the way to respond with life to the unlimited need of people today, who are so in need of the Gospel. Who would not desire to have people like Rose and her women constantly next to them, to go to the ends of the earth and shout to everyone, through the materiality of their own existence, “you have an infinite value”?
Julián Carrón, Professor of Theology, The Catholic University of the Sacred Heart
Christianity is a simple story, made of life-changing encounters. Like the story of Rose, which Davide Perillo recounts in a book full of reality and emotion.
Maurizio Crippa, Il Foglio
The story of Rose Busingye, nurse and member of Communion and Liberation, is a punch to the gut that makes you think about the complex relationship between religion and international cooperation.
Domani
The slim and classy book — Slant Books does books of exceedingly good taste and style —is brand new and I think for some of our readers it will be a godsend. It is beautifully told by an excellent and esteemed Italian journalist…. So many books about Christian ministry (especially those of a missionary sort) are told with too much glory and not enough reality of the pain and sorrow. Some tell of social concerns and international development but are not rooted in the tender mercies of the God of the gospel. Your Names Are Written.. is the kind of book many need — a first hand story of good, good work, done by an unassuming Ugandan nurse and her band of empowered women.
Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds Bookstore
