Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati

Pier Giorgio Frassati smiled and laughed so freely that he was called “an explosion of joy.” He whistled and sang loudly and hopelessly out of tune. He loved playful teasing and practical jokes. In his early 20's, he was the picture of strength and health, leading groups of friends into the Alps to scale mountain peaks.
His ready laughter and adventurous spirit were fountains that sprang from a well of holiness. Pier Giorgio was so filled with virtue that Saint John Paul II, who beatified him in 1990, called him the “Man of the Beatitudes.” Joy of life and love of God coursed readily through his veins. Could anyone who knew him in the sunshine of his youth, in the early twentieth century in Turin, Italy, have believed that he would die before the age of 25?
Pier Giorgio's wealthy father was an important senator and owned one of Italy's most prestigious newspapers, but Pier Giorgio was always broke and often begged for money from his family and friends—not for himself, but for the poor, whom he visited and served daily, and to whom he gave every cent he could find.
To his family, he was merely an engineering student—an average one, who worked hard but for whom learning never came easily. They saw him come and go from their large estate, where the discord between his parents created an atmosphere of constricted love, and where no one fully knew or understood Pier Giorgio, and they never guessed where he actually went.
When Pier Giorgio first began to feel sick, he tried hard to hide it. His grandmother was on her deathbed upstairs in the Frassati home, and he did not want to bother anyone with his own ailments. Every time he came in the door, he inquired about his grandmother and went to visit her room. As his sickness progressed, he became less and less able to move, yet he still pushed himself out of his bedroom and down the hall to pray at his grandmother's bedside. One sleepless night followed another, as he stumbled down the hall and back again, unable to rest, unwilling to complain.
His family, consumed by his grandmother's illness, believed he had the flu. A doctor who came to examine him diagnosed him with rheumatism; and so, the veil remained. While his grandmother approached her death, no one knew that a few doors away, death was coming for her grandson, too.
Pier Giorgio wouldn't have wanted it any other way. He prayed his heart out for his grandmother and exhorted others to pray, too. “Go to Grandmother,” he told his sister Luciana. “Pray for her because her condition is very serious,”—and then he broke down and sobbed.
When his grandmother passed away, polio was ravaging Pier Giorgio's body and beginning to paralyze him—yet every two hours throughout the night, he made his way to his grandmother's room, where he stood and prayed, or knelt and prayed, each time appearing more exhausted, less able to rise again.
All the while, his family thought what an inconvenient time he had chosen to get sick. “You're letting yourself go,” his mother told him, not knowing that he would be dead two days later. “If you want to get well, you must get hold of yourself.”
His family's blindness helped to conform him to the Person he most wanted to imitate. It gave him the opportunity to be more like Christ. For as Pier Giorgio—a daily communicant who strived to live the Gospel with every breath he took—was misunderstood by his loved ones as his death came near, so was his Lord misunderstood by His loved ones as His death approached, as well.
Two days after Pier Giorgio's grandmother died, the doctor who had diagnosed him with rheumatism returned and, deeply grieved by what he found, called for a second doctor, who called for a third, to confirm the sad diagnosis: poliomyelitis.
His family reeled in shock and grasped for quickly unraveling threads of hope while the paralysis moved into his lungs. As they struggled to comprehend the first hidden truth—that he was dying—the second hidden truth came to the surface as well: that he had been surreptitiously serving the poor in the manner of a saint.
One of his last acts was to ask Luciana to retrieve some medicine and a pawn ticket from his study. With effort that Luciana calls “impossible to describe,” he scrawled a note to ensure the items would reach the poor people for whom he had kept them. This small glimpse of charity on his deathbed was only a hint of what would come to light after his death.
Pier Giorgio took his last breath on July 4, 1925. At his funeral, thousands of people from every part of the city flooded the streets.
“The letters we began to receive and even more what was said about Pier Giorgio by unknown friends and all the strangers who turned to us constituted a revelation so imposing and so sublime that it overwhelmed us at least as much as his death,” Luciana writes In her beautiful memoir My Brother Pier Giorgio: His Last Days. Only then did his family realize the impact he had made and the lives he had touched in the name of Jesus. Only then did they begin to understand the truth about Pier Giorgio. Only then did the lifted veil reveal that they had been living with a person of extraordinary grace.

By Maura Roan McKeegan, "The Hidden Truth about Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati", July 5, 2016, on Catholic Exchange. 

Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati's patronage consists of students, young Catholics, mountaineers, youth groups, Catholic Action, and World Youth Days. 

Teachings of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati

On the poor: "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. All around the sick, the poor, the unfortunate, I see a particular light, a light that we do not have."

On life: "To live without faith, without a patrimony to defend, without a steady struggle for truth, that is not living, but merely existing."

On courage: “One ought to go and one goes. It is not those who suffer violence that should fear, but those who practice it. When God is with us, we do not need to be afraid.”

Meditation

“In this trying time that our country is going through [The rise of Fascism], we Catholics and especially we students, have a serious duty to fulfill: our self-formation. 
We, who by the grace of God are Catholics, must steel ourselves for the battle we shall certainly have to fight to fulfill our program and give our country, in the not too distant future, happier days and a morally healthy society, but to achieve this we need constant prayer to obtain from God that grace without which all our efforts are useless; organization and discipline to be ready for action at the right time; and finally, the sacrifice of our passion and of ourselves, because without that we cannot achieve our aim.”
- Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, Turin, Italy, 1922.

Prayer for the Youth with Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati

O Father, you gave to the young Pier Giorgio Frassati  the joy of meeting Christ  and of living his faith in the service of the poor and the sick; through his intercession may we, may our youth, walk the path of the beatitudes and follow the example of his generosity, spreading the spirit of the Gospel in society. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.

By Cardinal Giovanni Saldarini, Archbishop of Turin, Italy. 

Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, pray for our youth!

Pictures: 

Top picture: Portrait of Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati, by Christopher Santer, Pacem Studio. Used with permission. 

Bottom picture: Pier Giorgio Frassati on a mountain. CC0 Public domain.