Saints
A heroic Christian: A man of the beatitudes: Pier Giorgio Frassati : A Review
By John Muggeridge

Hardcopy Issue Date: October 2002
Online Publication Date: Oct 23, 2002, 22:28

Luciana Frassati, A man of the beatitudes: Pier Giorgio Frassati, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2000, pp. 180, $19.95 U.S.

One thing saints needn't worry about is failing to let their light shine before men. It seems that no amount of self-effacement on their part can keep them in spiritual obscurity. Consider Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez, a semi-illiterate 16th-century Jesuit lay brother; he served for forty-six years as doorman at a college run by his Order on the island of Majorca. Now, four hundred years later, he continues to be revered as a great saint, whose canonization nearly two centuries ago Gerard Manley Hopkins has commemorated in verse.

Then there's Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati. Few pious Catholics can have had a better shot at doing their alms in secret. This young man, who spent his days in young manly pursuits, his evenings patrolling the streets of Turin in search of the poor and the sick in need of help, and his nights as often as not kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament, died suddenly of polio on July 4, 1925, just before writing his final exams in engineering at a local technical college. At twenty-four, he was an inveterate mountain-climber, practical jokester, and founder of facetiously named societies. He smoked a pipe, enjoyed female society, took delight in poetry and operas, and called himself Robes Pierre. Nor, as things then stood, did his membership in a Catholic student fraternity and support for Catholic political causes point any more clearly to uncommon religious zeal. In the words of Pope John Paul II at Pier Giorgio's beatification Mass in May, 1990, "Frassati's life-style, that of a modern young man who was full of life, does not present anything out of the ordinary." But this is precisely, according to John Paul II, where "the originality of his virtue" lies; in Frassati "faith and daily events are harmoniously fused."

The Pope, of course, understands only too well what suffering the achievement of such harmony between one's spiritual and secular existence can entail. According to A Man of the Beatitudes, Luciana Frassati's loving biography of her brother, first published in 1970, and now being reissued by Ignatius Press in time for World Youth Day, the biggest cross Pier Giorgio had to bear was the antipathy felt for him by his parents. They knew what he was up to and despised him for it. His father, a professed agnostic, complained that, in going to daily Mass and attending St. Vincent de Paul Society meetings, Pier Giorgio was wasting time better spent in studying. His mother, who limited her practice of Catholicism to attending Mass on Holy Days of obligation, felt much the same way. Luciana Frassati depicts her as a weak-minded and superstitious woman, who once tried to prevent her son from going to confession on the grounds that it would put bad thoughts in his mind.

It was the father's hostility, however, which hurt most. As a Senator, proprietor of the famous liberal newspaper La Stampa, and at one time Italy's ambassador to Germany, Alfredo Frassati had clout. According to Luciana, he used it against his son. She tells us, for example, of how, when a rich uncle, whose death bed Pier Giorgio had attended, left the two children a million lire, their father, in an act obviously intended to humiliate his son, gave the money to charity. But the biggest bone of contention between them, remembers Luciana, was over the question of Pier Giorgio's future. Frassati senior expected Pier Giorgio, as his only male heir, to join him at La Stampa. The son, who had no calling to the priesthood, saw becoming a mining engineer as tantamount to a religious vocation. Having passed the necessary exams and obtained a job, he would set about evangelizing his fellow miners. For the father, this whole idea was imbecilic, and he continued to demand that Pier Giorgio take his rightful place in La Stampa's accounting department. Finally, when Luciana warned her brother that their parents' marriage, already on the rocks, could not survive both her imminent marriage and his continued refusal to comply with their father's wishes, the future Blessed, in perhaps his saintliest act so far, put aside a life-long distaste for dealing with money and submitted.

In the end, Pier Giorgio's holiness shone through. His funeral rivalled that of Don Bosco, Turin's other favourite Catholic son. Citizens from all walks of life lined the route, followed by the funeral cortege. The Archbishop said the requiem Mass. Alfredo Frassati embraced the editor-in-chief of Corriere della serra, La Stampa's biggest rival. "I barely realized," wrote Luciana, so distracted was she by grief, "that a new message was being born."

And it has never stopped getting louder. It reached the ears of a young Karol Wojtyla in pre World War II Poland. In 1932, C.C.Martindale, a then well-known British Jesuit, confessed to a B.B.C radio audience that "a fragment of Pier Giorgio's writing, scrawled in anguish as he died" hung above his pillow. "All I can ask," he concluded, "is that my last end be like his, and that our young university men and women, in every land, may obtain his intercession."

But surely the most impressive witness to gale-force holiness in young Frassati is that of another even better-known Jesuit, Karl Rahner. In 1970 he recalled a meeting with Pier Giorgio fifty years earlier. He was seventeen at the time, and the future Blessed twenty-one. He remembers Frassati as "a Christian, simply and in an absolutely spontaneous way, as if it were something spontaneous for everybody...", and one who possesses, moreover, "the strength and courage to be what he is, not from opposition to his parents' generation, not from a prognosis and diagnosis of the culture of the time or some such idea, but from the Christian reality itself: that God is, that what sustains us is prayer, that the Eucharist nourishes what is eternal in us, that all people are brothers and sisters."

This is the authentic voice of contemporary Catholicism: clear, bright, hopeful, and uncomplicated by dogma or tradition, but above all ecumenical. It is entirely in keeping with that voice, then, that John Paul should have called Frassati "a man of the beatitudes", those eight injunctions being among Our Lord's least sectarian teachings. Not that Frassati was any less Catholic for being an activist. A daily communicant, he saw the Blessed Sacrament both as food for the soul and as sustenance in the war against God's enemies.

Back from the altar, he marched against liberal revolutionists, single handedly drove Fascist thugs from under his roof, and championed the only political party in Rome that unreservedly upheld Truth. The Pope rightly called him "a modern witness to the hope which springs from the Gospel." Read Luciana Frassati's biography in the right spirit, promises Karl Rahner, and you will meet a heroic Christian.