Pier Giorgio Frassati lived for only twenty four years. Yet his life was so full of love for the poor that when he died the poor of Turin all flocked to his home to touch him like a relic. John Murray traces his life.
The adventurer, Chris Bonington, climbed mountains. No matter how high, or how terrible the conditions, he did not stop until he had conquered the peak before him. ‘Why do you do it?’ someone once asked. The reply was terse: ‘Because it’s there.’
Magnificence of God
Pier Giorgio Frassati was an avid skier and keen mountain climber, a man with film-star looks. Like Chris, he too could have said, ‘because it’s there’. Yet the real peak that Pier ascended was surely divine. ‘On top of the mountains, I feel closer to God,’ he once said. ‘I leave my heart on the mountains, and if my studies permitted, I would spend whole days there, admiring the magnificence of God.’
Pier was born in Turin, in Italy, in April 1901, the son of Alfredo and Adelaide Frassati. His father was a senator in Italy and an ambassador to Germany, as well as being the founder of La Stampa magazine, which is still one of the most popular publications in Italy even today. In terms of class and social standing, Pier had everything.
Family environment
However, although his parents raised him and his sister in the faith, they themselves were not particularly devout. It is true in every age, of course, that people pay lip service to God, never missing Mass or other major ceremonies, but seldom having prayer in the home, and never talking about their faith as a living reality. God is worshipped, but Jesus is never mentioned.
Pier’s sister would later write, ‘Our mother and her sister, who would not have missed Sunday Mass or days of obligation for anything, were never seen by us to visit the Blessed Sacrament or go to Benediction. They never went to communion, or were seen to kneel and say a prayer’.
Singular devotion
Despite this, Pier was a testimony to the miraculous way in which God raises up in every generation men and women who help to redeem the age, who become the salt that has not lost its taste. This athletic, outgoing and charming young man was also a daily communicant, at a time in the Church when that was not the norm.
When asked once why he performed so many acts of charity, Pier replied, ‘Jesus comes to visit me each morning in Holy Communion. I return his visit to him in the poor’. Indeed, after every trip to the mountains, he would immediately make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament in his local church.
Compassion
The concern for the poor began at an early age. When he was four, a poor woman appeared at the family door with a barefoot child in her arms. Quickly, Pier stripped off his own socks and shoes, and handed them over before anyone could question his actions. Another time, a beggar came to the door, and his father sent him away cursorily. Pier rushed to his mother, and the only way she could calm him down was to tell him to run after the man and bring him back for some food.
When he was eighteen years of age, he enrolled in Turin’s Royal Polytechnic. He was planning a career in mining engineering, for he felt that miners were among the most unfortunate of men in their conditions and living standards. He could have chosen a life of ease, but instead pursued a goal that reflected his concern for others and his lack of interest in comfort and wealth.
In this same year, inspired by St. Paul’s discourse on love (1 Cor. 13:1-13), Pier joined the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. This brought him face to face with all manner of suffering but, as a friend later wrote, ‘he knew how to walk amid this lurid world’s mud without getting dirty’.
Earthly pilgrimage
Pier himself would say, ‘As we grow close to the poor, bit by bit we gain their confidence, and can advise them in the most terrible moments of this earthly pilgrimage. We can give them the comforting words of faith, and we often succeed, not by our own merit, in putting on the right road people who have strayed without meaning to’.
Elsewhere he wrote, ‘Don’t ever forget that, even though the house is sordid, you are approaching Christ. Remember what the Lord said: “The good you do to the poor is good done to me”. Around the sick, the poor, the unfortunate, I see a particular light that we do not have’.
Sensitivity
Pier often had an eye for things that others ignored or did not notice. Once, when entering a club with some friends for a night out, he observed that the doorman was sad. The man’s grandson had just died, and Pier offered him words of consolation and prayer. A year later, he was to remember the occasion and was able to renew his sympathy to the porter. Such kindness did not go amiss.
‘From long-faced saints, deliver us, O Lord,’ St. Teresa of Avila once wrote. She would surely have approved of Pier Giorgio Frassati, for he certainly was not one of the sad saints. Right through his short life, he retained his friends, who knew him as a prankster and as a young man of robust and outgoing temperament. One friend nicknamed him ‘Robespierre’, and in his trips to the mountains he was never the one to hang back and wait for braver souls to venture forth.
Untimely end
In June 1925, Pier contracted polio while visiting an abandoned sick person. His grandmother was dying at the same time, and the family was so concerned for her health that no one really noticed the young man’s deterioration. His mother, who tended to be over-critical at the best of times, could not understand why Pier was not present at his grandmother’s final moments. By then, however, Pier was paralysed from the waist down. ‘Pier Giorgio could choose a better moment to be ill,’ she remarked coldly.
Even in his final hours, he was thinking of others. With one arm still functioning, spared from the paralysis which was creeping through him, he pulled a packet of medicine from his pocket with instructions regarding the poor person for whom it was intended. A few hours later he was dead. He was barely twenty-four years of age.
Once the news of his death got around, a remarkable thing happened. Within a short space of time, the doors began to open to let in a silent throng of people, unknown to his family. With faces blank or wet with tears, they went in to him to touch him like a relic.
His beloved poor, often living lives of quiet desperation, accompanied him for the final journey. His funeral was the first indication that his process of canonisation had begun. It was the poor of Turin, who knew their quiet visitor only as ‘Fra Girolamo’, who petitioned the Archbishop to begin the process which would eventually lead to his beatification.
In 1990, Pope John Paul declared Pier Giorgio blessed. ‘By his example,’ the Pope said on that occasion, ‘he proclaims that a life lived in Christ’s spirit, the spirit of the Beatitudes, is blessed. He testifies that holiness is possible for everyone. He left this world rather young, but he made a mark upon this century, and not only on our century. In the Easter power of his baptism, he can say to everyone, especially to the young, “You will see me because I live, and you will live'” (Jn 14:19).
