Cristina Siccardi - Pier Giorgio Frassati: A Hero for Our Times

PIER GIORGIO FRASSATI

CRISTINA SICCARDI

A Hero for Our Times

Translated by Michael J. Miller

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Original Italian edition:
Pier Giorgio Frassati: Il giovane delle otto beatitudini
2002 Edizioni San Paolo s.r.l., Cinisello Balsamo, Italy

2016 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-000-4 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-715-0 (EB)
Library of Congress Control Number 2014949948
Printed in the United States of America

A new biography of Pier Giorgio Frassati? But what else can be said about him?

Faced with the mass of documents, volumes, questionnaires for the canonization process, and testimonies old and new, we felt like castaways, just as Pier Giorgio felt when faced with books and lecture notes. Thousands upon thousands of pages have been written about this Blessed, who is loved so much yet sometimes not understood: recollections and memoirs that we have examined attentively in order to try to understand who this young man was who lived scarcely twenty-four years but was capable of leaving an indelible impression of sanctity. The famous theologian Karl Rahner, whose works Pier Giorgio knew, writes: God does not grant to all the grace to die young, when everything is morning promise and immaculate beginning. And not every early death is the fulfillment of this beginning.

What we tried to do was reconstruct, in a sea of papers, not only the personality of Pier Giorgio, which was by no means simple, but also a set of very complex and contradictory family relationships: the story of souls in search of ties that were established only at the end.

Pier Giorgio, proclaimed Blessed on May 20, 1990, is the only saintly young man in whose name the younger generations gather in prayer in various parts of the world. He is a figure who remains extraordinarily relevant, and for this reason, too, people never tire of talking about him. He was a forerunner of the apostolic laity, an interpreter of Vatican Council II ante litteram [before the conciliar documents were written]. In the letter Operosam diem by John Paul II, we read: It is characteristic of the saints mysteriously to remain contemporaries with every generation: this is the result of their profound rootedness in the eternal present of God.

Marked by the sign of Christian joy, Pier Giorgio, who repeatedly experienced a lack of understanding in his own family that was as serious as the sense of remorse and self-blame of those immediately involved, was not the son of his father, who went no farther than to donate to charities. Pier Giorgio was quite different; his charity was the mature fruit of his ongoing interior work, of his boundless love for his neighbor and in a very special way for the poor: he shared in their sufferings while seeking to alleviate them, and into the attics and slums of Turin in the second and third decades of the twentieth century he brought the light of his person, his unabashed smile, and his overflowing vitality.

On the day of his funeral, the eyes of his father, his mother, and his sister were opened to a totally unknown reality: thousands of persons arrived to pay their last respects to the friend of the poor and their own, touching his coffin as though it belonged to a saint. The youth who, instead of studying, lounged around with his friends from the Church of San Vincenzo, from FUCI [Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana, the Association of Italian Catholic University Students], from the Peoples Party of Don Sturzo, in the friary of the Dominican Fathers, in the sacristies of churches, wasting his time in prayer, Eucharistic celebrations, reading Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and Saint Thomas, and who at the diplomatic mission in Berlin, where his father was ambassador, used to steal the flowers in the meeting rooms so as to put them on the graves of poor people, now drew a crowd, not because of the famous name he bore, but because of the good works he had performed. His success was not of the earthly sort continually pursued by the Frassati family, but rather an eternal accomplishment that will never fade or tarnish.

The civil engineer Pier Giorgio Frassati, endowed with a lively practical intelligence, whose university degree was conferred post mortem in 2001, a hundred years after his birth, was truly ahead of his time, living out the lay apostolate in a missionary spirit and with tireless commitment; he was a champion of charity, speaking, acting, and thinking in the name of Christ and of the Gospel in a way consistent with a marvelous life of integrity.

Self-taught in the faith, although he grew up in a materialistic, sterile, and spiritually arid environment, he had a soul as wide as an ocean and let it emerge in all its radiance. A strong, extremely intense call from God led him along a very personal, sweeping path: it not only gave meaning to his life but also fired him up and opened limitless vistas.

His proverbial cheerfulness diminished in the last phase of his life, when signs of his premature end appeared. It was dampened by a series of conditions that were suffocating him: his love for Laura Hidalgo, his fathers plan to involve him professionally in La Stampa , the daily newspaper that he himself had founded and now edited, and fear that his beloved parents would separate. These were trials to which the Blessed responded with a personal maturation that is clearly evident from his writings but also from his face, which gradually lost its last boyish features.

Pier Giorgios education in sanctity is fascinating: he did not renounce his privileged status but made of it an instrument of charity, demonstrating that the rich young man in the Gospel failed to do the will of God, not because he had a lot of money, but because he was full of himself, proud and seemingly self-sufficient. Pier Giorgio, on the contrary, set out humbly but resolutely on the path shown to him by the Savior, and his was an Imitation of Christ that always put God first, ahead of everything and everyone.

In parallel with the earthly career of Pier Giorgio, we have conducted an investigation of his father, Senator Alfredo Frassati, a supremely gifted individual: endowed with an astonishing intellect, he was not only a magisterial journalist but also an expert in politics and an entrepreneur on a grand scale. Extremely proud of his successful position within the middle-class society of the major world powers, his life broke down when death carried off his son, for whom he had feelings of pride and respect and whom he wanted to make his worthy heir. It broke down, but a new prospect opened up to him: the material goods on which he had spent his energies for fifty-seven years were replaced, year by year with ever greater intensity, by spiritual reflection. This, in our judgment, was the first miracle of Blessed Pier Giorgio. The two men of the Frassati household, as unlike as they were and however different their earthly ideals, were reunited in their full understanding of the soul: the son led the father to Christ. This aspect of the story emerges quite clearly through an investigation of the facts, but also through precious unpublished documents. We are talking about correspondence, which is now published in this book, between Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI and then-archbishop of the principal city in Lombardy, and Senator Frassati. It is a story of spiritual pain and conversion that is in turn forceful, passionate, andas we must say without exaggerationmoving.

Another story, never told before, is the one about the relationship between Pier Giorgio and Laura Hidalgo, with whom he fell in love. In biographies of the Blessed, Laura always has remained hidden in the shadows, mentioned and then nothing more. Now we finally know who she was, her origins, and her life experience after the departure of the young man of the beatitudes.