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How blessed are the poor in spirit: the kingdom of Heaven is theirs.(Matthew 5:3)
Be merry, really merry. The life of a true Christian should be a perpetual jubilee, a prelude to the festivals of eternity.—St. Théophane Vénard (1829–1861)
Pier Giorgio Frassati has become the hero of contemporary young Catholics because they see themselves in him. They recognize that he held himself to a high Christian ideal while pursuing the same pleasures that they enjoy. They gravitate to this handsome and charming saint who organized mountain-climbing expeditions and parties for his friends—and who, at the same time, delighted in reciting the poetry of Dante, praying the rosary in his booming voice, and spending a night in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
Pope John Paul II and Pier Giorgio’s biographers celebrate him as a man of the Beatitudes. That he was poor in spirit and pure of heart was obvious to all, but he manifested these divine qualities in a very balanced and human way. Athletic and strong, he devoted himself to the weak and malformed. He was wealthy, but he lived in poverty so he could give everything to the poor. He was gregarious but a lover of solitude. He was rambunctious, the life of every party, and a practical joker, but at prayer he was solemn, reflective, and quiet.
One of my favorite photographs of Pier Giorgio shows him descending an Alpine mountain, smiling with a pipe in his mouth. He used to quip that he liked smoking because his mother had smoked cigars when she nursed him. Another of my favorites has him and several buddies cheerfully dragging a barrel of wine to some festivity. But I also carry in my memory the testimony of his friend who reported that when Pier Giorgio left a church after an hour of prayer, he would turn and give a little wave toward the tabernacle. I regard that affectionate gesture as emblematic of his closeness to Jesus.
Catholic young people today love Pier Giorgio because, unlike other saints who appear to them to be otherworldly, they regard him as “normal”—showing them that they can live the Christian life in our thoroughly secularized world. They freely imitate his piety, which centered on the Eucharist, Scripture, and Mary. His selfless care for the poor challenges them to dedicate themselves to Christian service. One biographer called Pier Giorgio an “ordinary” Christian, but if so, being an ordinary Christian means putting God first in everything and spending yourself entirely for others.
In this concluding chapter, I present Pier Giorgio Frassati as a portrait of the normal Christian life. I have titled it “Joy” because he bore great sorrows joyfully beneath the enthusiastic surface of his service, friendships, politics, sport, and fun. His happiness did not depend upon externals. Rather his joy stemmed from an intimate relationship with Jesus, which enabled him to be happy in the midst of painful circumstances, especially in his difficult relationship with his parents. “My life is monotonous,” he once said, “but each day I understand a little better the incomparable grace of being a Catholic. Down, then, with all melancholy. That should never find a place except in the heart which has lost faith. I am joyful. Sorrow is not gloom. Gloom should be banished from the Christian soul.”3
Pier Giorgio Frassati was born in Turin, Italy, on April 6, 1901. His sister, Luciana, who became his closest friend, was born seventeen months later. His father, Alfredo Frassati, owned and edited La Stampa, an influential liberal newspaper. Adelaide Ametis, his mother, was an artist whose wealthy family owned a villa at Pollone, fifty miles from the Frassati home in Turin.
From childhood, Pier Giorgio experienced a tension-filled family life because his parents had drifted apart. Their frequent arguments made for an acidic household environment. Adelaide and the children summered at Pollone, while Alfredo stayed in Turin to manage his newspaper. This annual separation symbolized the deterioration of their marriage. The alienation of his parents from each other, which only intensified over the years, saddened Pier Giorgio with a heartache that he felt daily.
The family situation toughened Pier Giorgio’s character and subtly drew him to Christ, but his parents did little to encourage his spiritual formation. He received his religious training from priests and nuns at school. Alfredo was an agnostic and was displeased with Pier Giorgio’s spirituality. Once, he complained to a priest that he found his preteen son asleep on the floor with a rosary in his hand. The priest, who had baptized Pier Giorgio, caught Alfredo up short with his reply: “Perhaps you would rather have him fall asleep with a dirty novel?”
Adelaide did not like or understand Pier Giorgio’s religious inclinations, which she worried might lead him to the priesthood instead of to a secular career. When a Jesuit invited her twelve-year-old son to daily Mass and Communion, she strenuously opposed the idea. She feared that it would make him a narrow-minded Catholic. But after several days of Pier Giorgio’s begging, she relented. And from that time, daily Mass and Communion became his routine.
When Pier Giorgio and Luciana reached their teen years, the family’s relationships deteriorated even further. Neither Pier Giorgio nor his sister were very good students, and both Adelaide and Alfredo expressed displeasure at their academic failures. Alfredo sometimes called Pier Giorgio stupid, hoping to spur him to success, but it only pushed him away. Family tensions erupted at mealtimes, with Alfredo and Adelaide arguing vigorously and Pier Giorgio and Luciana withdrawing into silence. Pier Giorgio dreaded suppertime and often came late. Luciana says he made the sign of the cross before entering the dining room. And in response to his tardiness, Adelaide would comment, “There he is lost in his thoughts. He remembers Mass times but not meal times.”
In 1918, at the age of seventeen, Pier Giorgio joined the St. Vincent de Paul Society. As he began to visit poor people, he fell in love with them. Turin teemed with jobless veterans who had returned from World War I. Destitute laboring families had also poured into the city, attracted to its growing industries. Delivering food, clothing, and money to these needy people became Pier Giorgio’s daily passion. His works of mercy took precedence over both school and family. In a typical week, his acts of kindness looked something like this: Sunday, galoshes for a barefoot child; Monday, a room for a homeless woman; Tuesday, boots for an unemployed laborer; Wednesday, payment of a girl’s school bill; Thursday, relocation for a blind veteran; Friday, groceries for a hungry family; Saturday, medicine for an old man with bronchitis. Adelaide did not realize that this selfless giving, not some scatterbrained religiosity, accounted for her son’s recurrent lateness to dinner. Frequently he had to run home from the slums because he had given a beggar his money for the train.
Pier Giorgio impoverished himself in order to give as much as he could to the poor. When a friend asked why he traveled uncomfortably on trains in third class, he said, “Because there’s not a fourth class.” That response symbolized his selflessness. Once, in twelve-degree-below-zero weather, Pier Giorgio came home wearing a smile but no overcoat, which he had given to an elderly homeless man. Alfredo angrily confronted him, but he disarmed his father by simply saying, “But you see, Dad, it was cold.” As a graduation present, Alfredo gave him the choice of a car or its value in cash. He took the money and invested it in the people who needed it more. Luciana shared a thousand lire from her wedding gifts with her brother on the condition that he would use it for himself. But Pier Giorgio gave five hundred lire to the St. Vincent de Paul society for furniture. He anonymously donated the remaining five hundred lire to help a disabled man set up a sherbet stand to support his family.
Pier Giorgio especially enjoyed his relationships with those he served. For example, one day a shopkeeper volunteered to distribute his gifts for him, but he declined. “I prefer to deliver the packages personally, because that way I can also encourage the people a bit, give them hope that their lives will change, and above all I can convince them to offer their sufferings to God and to go to Mass.”
A friend once asked Pier Giorgio why the filth of the hovels he visited did not repulse him. “Jesus comes to me every morning in Holy Communion,” he replied. “I repay him in my very small way by visiting the poor. The house may be sordid, but I am going to Christ.” With these few words Pier Giorgio revealed the heart of his spirituality. The joy that dissipated the sorrows of his life flowed from his intimacy with Jesus. He expressed his love for Christ in his service to the poor. He sustained it with a sacramental, scriptural, and Marian piety.
Pier Giorgio loved Jesus in the Eucharist. He rose early every morning to worship him at Mass and receive him in Communion before the day began. He even scheduled his excursions to the mountains to ensure his attendance at Mass, no matter how inconvenient. He spent many hours each week in local churches, silently adoring the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. “After a prayer vigil,” he said, “I feel stronger, safer, more secure, and even happier.” Once, according to a friend, he became so absorbed in prayer during an all-night vigil that he did not notice wax from a large candle dripping on his head. Pier Giorgio also drew spiritual strength by frequenting the Sacrament of Reconciliation. On one memorable occasion, he bumped into a priest friend on the road and asked him to hear his confession. The priest pointed to a nearby church where they could go, but Pier Giorgio uninhibitedly made his confession on the street.
Pier Giorgio grounded his spirituality on Scripture, especially the letters of St. Paul, which he also urged his friends to read. As a reminder of the motive for his acts of kindness, he posted a copy of 1 Corinthians 13—Paul’s magnificent hymn to love—on his desk. He regularly read The Imitation of Christ, which along with the New Testament, he included in his gift packages to poor families. He relieved the boredom of his studies by reading St. Augustine’s Confessions. “Never before,” he wrote to a friend, “have I found such endless enjoyment, because in reading Augustine’s powerful Confessions, we get a glimpse of the joy reserved for those who die under the sign of the cross.”
Pier Giorgio complemented his love for Christ in the sacraments and Scripture with a lively devotion to Mary. He always had a rosary at hand and prayed it several times a day, often inviting his friends to join him. He tacked on his bedroom door St. Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin from Dante’s Paradiso: “Lady, you are so great and accessible, that anyone who wants grace and fails to ask your intercession—his desire tries to fly without wings.” When he was at Pollone he made daily pilgrimages to the shrine of the Madonna of Oropa, about five miles from the villa. In order to wake up before the family, he designed a unique alarm. He tied a rope around his foot and dropped it out the window, so that the gardener could pull it and awaken him. At the shrine, he asked Mary to intercede for his family and friends. One time he requested her protection for a friend who was training to be a pilot: “On the twenty-seventh I will be hiking up to Oropa,” he wrote his friend in a letter that captures the spirit of Pier Giorgio’s Marian piety, and I will pray for you at the feet of the Black Madonna, for whatever my prayers are worth. As soon as I get back to Turin, I will send you a keepsake: a rosary made from the seeds of some garden plant, to which I will attach a medal of the Madonna of Loreto. May the Virgin Mary watch over you when you “ride with the wind” (See Psalm 104:3).
In May 1922, Pier Giorgio joined the Third Order of St. Dominic, a serious step in preparation for his vocation of service to the poor. As a tertiary, he took the name Girolamo, after Girolamo Savonarola, the fifteenth-century Dominican. He thought highly of the controversial Savonarola, who had championed social and political reform in the city of Florence and had opposed its corrupt de Medici rulers. He told a friend he wanted to imitate his namesake: “I am a fervent admirer of this friar, who died as a saint at the stake. In becoming a tertiary I wanted to take him as a model, but I am far from being like him.” Although Savonarola had been excommunicated and executed because of his attacks on the Roman Curia and the pope, some Dominicans in Pier Giorgio’s day believed that he had been unfairly treated and formed a movement to have Savonarola canonized.
Pier Giorgio’s fascination with Savonarola indicates that he intended to spend his life working for social change. Although Pier Giorgio found joy in his personal service to the poor, he also wanted to help relieve the causes of poverty. As a university student, he decided to major in mechanical engineering at Turin’s Royal Polytechnic so that he could work with miners, who were considered the lowest of the working classes, and contribute to improving their life circumstances.
Impressed with the activism of the German priest Fr. Karl Sonnenschein and the Italian priest Fr. Luigi Sturzo, Pier Giorgio considered working for societal reform as a priest. But, ultimately, he made a strategic decision to pursue his goals as a layman. In the fall of 1921, Pier Giorgio visited Freiburg, Germany, where he stayed with the Rahner family, whose two sons, Karl and Hugo, would later become Jesuits. Their mother, Louise Rahner, remembered that Pier Giorgio told her he had decided not to become a priest because he could do more for the poor as a layman. “I want to do whatever I can to help my people,” he said, and I think I can do this better as a layman than as a priest, because at home priests are not in such close contact with the people as they are here in Germany. By giving good example as a mining engineer, I can actually be much more effective.
Pier Giorgio translated his idealism into action. He participated as a leader in student political organizations and joined Luigi Sturzo’s Popular Party. He had a vision of uniting professionals with workers in order to form a body of leaders who could collaborate to improve conditions for Italy’s lower classes. He proposed such a union of forces to a political congress at Ravenna in 1921. Although his initiative was defeated, it demonstrated that in addition to his personal acts of charity, he was working for structural changes in society to help the poor.
The rise of Mussolini and Fascism in the early 1920s distressed Pier Giorgio, and he courageously resisted the movement. At great personal risk, he worked with opposition parties and marched in anti-Fascist demonstrations. He spoke openly against Mussolini and his party, denouncing them publicly. At least the Communists had the ideal of raising the working class, he said, “But what ideals do the Fascists have? Filthy lucre, paid by the industrialists and, shamefully, by our government.” Pier Giorgio could hardly control his rage when Mussolini came to power in October 1922 with the limited support of the Popular Party. “I glanced at Mussolini’s speech,” he wrote, “and my blood boiled. I am disappointed by the really shameful behavior of the Popular Party. Where is the fine program, where is the faith which motivates our people? But when it is a matter of turning out for worldly honors, people trample on their own conscience.”
For Pier Giorgio, involvement in politics and social reform was an act of faith. And his sacramental piety fired his fervor. Every morning when the priest concluded Mass, saying, “Ite, missa est!” (“Go, you are sent!”), he accepted it as the Lord’s charge to work for justice in his world. For him, observed Luciana, “living in society meant struggling for the Spirit to return, reactivating it where it was feeble and kindling it where it did not exist.”
Lighthearted fun with friends occupied much of the last year of Pier Giorgio’s short life. He and his closest comrades had formed a society they called “The Shady Characters,” a merry group of young men and women that indulged in good times. Each member had an office, and Pier Giorgio was designated “practical joker,” a role that he already played very well. He and a friend constituted “The Terror” subsection of the club. They cracked jokes, played hoaxes, short-sheeted beds, and sent a little donkey to a member who hated studying. I can imagine what they might have done with duct tape, had it been invented. The society gathered for mountain-climbing expeditions, which Pier Giorgio planned and directed. At mountain tops he led his friends in prayer, celebrating the One who created the majestic peaks. After the climb, they relaxed and enjoyed food, wine, cigars, and songs. On these joyful occasions, Pier Giorgio sang loudly in his deep voice. He knew he was always off-key but protested that “the important thing is to sing.”
However, this year of fun with friends masked deep sorrows that roiled in Pier Giorgio’s heart. He had fallen in love with Laura Hidalgo, one of the young women in the group. He kept his feelings for her secret, never telling her or anyone except Luciana about them. His heart’s desire was to marry her, but he knew that his father and mother would not approve of her as an appropriate wife for him because they wanted their son to marry someone of higher social status. Alfredo and Adelaide were on the verge of officially separating. Pier Giorgio believed that a decision to marry Laura would cause his parents to end their marriage. He could not bring himself to destroy one family by starting another. So he quietly bore the pain of saying no to his unspoken love.
Then, in 1925, when Pier Giorgio was about to graduate and begin working with miners to improve their lot, Alfredo sabotaged his dream. He decided that Pier Giorgio should be trained to become the manager of La Stampa. Reluctant to break the news himself, he had a business associate tell his decision to his son. Although dumbfounded and profoundly disappointed, Pier Giorgio acquiesced. “Do you think this will please my Dad?” he asked the messenger, who nodded yes. “Then tell him I accept.”
But the Lord claimed Pier Giorgio in death before this could happen. During the last days of June 1925, he became very ill. No one in the Frassati household paid much attention to him, as all were preoccupied with his grandmother, who also was dying. They thought his sickness would pass quickly, but polio, which he had probably caught from one of his beloved poor, aggressively ravished his body. He was unable to attend his grandmother’s funeral, and Adelaide ironically complained that he was never available when he was needed. When the family finally realized the seriousness of his illness, it was too late. Even on his deathbed, his love for the poor was first in Pier Giorgio’s thoughts. He asked Luciana to deliver some medicine to a sick man and to renew an insurance policy for a poor man on his behalf. He died on July 4, 1925.
The sudden death of the beloved young man left everyone in shock. Thousands of Turin’s poor came to the funeral to honor their benefactor, and their numbers astounded Alfredo and Adelaide, as they finally realized the extent of their son’s generosity and service. Pier Giorgio’s friends suffered boundless grief. Two days after his death, one of the young women whom Pier Giorgio had served wrote to Marco Beltramo, his close friend. In her letter, Clementina Luotti expressed the grievous loss that they all felt:
Now I recognize that I was so unworthy to be near that soul; and the thought makes me tremble… . I cannot pray—I do not say for him, which would sound like madness—that he may help me to deserve to remember him. I think that—as punishment to me—the Gospel threat has come true: “I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered” [see Mark 14:27]. It was his goodness that kept us united… . Oh, the marvelous youthfulness that emanated from him and floated around him, which made us so light-hearted, ready to take a plunge, so free of any mortal hindrance, so close to God who was in him! Who will ever give us this purifying joy again? Who will renew not only under our eyes but in us the miracle of joyful holiness, carefree and fresh and reviving as water from an Alpine spring?
I am thankful that Clementina was ultimately wrong. Pier Giorgio Frassati was beatified by Pope John Paul II on May 20, 1990. Now, as a saint, he renews in many of us who love him the miracle of joyful holiness.
Think, Pray, and Act
Take stock of your life. Are you pursuing holiness in the ordinary circumstances of your life? Are you living joyfully?
Think
Using Pier Giorgio’s life as a measure for comparison, ask yourself how well you are doing in key areas of normal Christian living:
~What means do I use to express my love for God? How faithful am I in expressing my love for God?
~ In what ways do I express my love for others? How faithful am I in expressing my love for others?
~ Am I experiencing joy in my daily circumstances? Why or why not?
Pray
~ Take half an hour of quiet time to pray and ask the Holy Spirit what one thing you could do to live the normal Christian life more effectively.
~ What might be one change you could make that would help you become more joyful?
Act
~ Once you have determined what you can do to live the normal Christian life more effectively, develop a simple plan to implement your decision. Figure out the easiest way to make it happen. Then do it for a predetermined period of time. At the end of the period, review how well you have done. Consider renewing or revising your plan.
Does anyone know how to send this article to Sarah Palin? I was reading the news regarding her announcement that she is leaving her office as Governor of Alaska in order to pursue a higher calling. Though the news media presents her decision with a derisive tone, I am hopeful that she plans to follow the example of Pier Giorgio and hope this article will provide her with courage.
Wishing you God’s abundant grace and blessings,
Johnnie