NeMoSanctI is the ERC research project that studies how Catholic saints have been offered as models of life perfection to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and how the modelization of sanctity has changed in the 20th century, especially after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). NeMoSanctI’s analysis focuses on a wide corpus of texts including hagiographies, literary texts featuring saints as characters, acts of causes for canonization, and norms issued by the Church to regulate both canonization procedures and the notion of sainthood. Semiotics constitutes the methodological framework of the project, in that it allows to analyze in a coherent manner texts belonging to different genres and to approach sanctity as a model of life perfection mediated through a plurality of channels and by different subjects. NeMoSanctI’s approach is characterized in particular by a focus on axiological and narrative structures underlying the texts composing the corpus. Indeed, from our perspective sanctity can be considered as a particular form of life characterized by a specific combination of narrative structures (for instance the tension towards the transcendence of human limits) and semantic and axiological categories (such as heroism and perfection in the practice of virtues). Sanctity thus appears as a “semiotic organization” characterizing a particular religious, social and cultural identity, and entailing passion, ethical and aesthetic determinants (Fontanille 2015: 13-14). The model of this form of life is proposed through embodied valorizations often coinciding with the stories of individual saints. As a case study, I will present a semiotic analysis of the figure of Saint Gianna Beretta Molla. Died in 1962 and canonized in 2004, Gianna was a spouse and a mother. She was canonized because she sacrificed her life to avoid abortion and save her baby, thus both representing the new ideal of secular sanctity particularly promoted during and after the Second Vatican Council (Rusconi 2005) and serving as a figurativization reinforcing the Church’s argument against abortion. I will outline the complex definition of this contemporary model of sanctity by analyzing how Gianna’s life story is interpreted and narrated both in a sample of testimonies contained in the acts of her cause for canonization and in hagiographic books and press about her.