Emotion and some tears. A long round of applause. In the church of the Fraterna Domus in Sacrofano the delegates of Catholic Action welcomed the news, surprised and happy, that during the next jubilee Pier Giorgio Frassati should be canonized. Cardinal Marcello Semeraro says it, almost in a low voice, but from the pulpit, prefect of the dicastery for the Causes of Saints. «A social saint», he defines him, after having also outlined the figures of Armida Barelli who did so much for women, for their rights and their participation in the life of the country «In the season of the return to democracy in our country after the devastation of the war”, she says, citing the message of the CEI on the occasion of the retreat for her beatification, “encouraged women, called to vote for the first time, to “understand what the social principles of the Church are in order to exercise our duty as citizens” because “we women are a force in Italy”. «Were you a feminist?», he asks. «No, she was Armida Barelli». And then he outlines the figure of Giuseppe Toniolo, “God’s economist”, as he has been defined. He talks about Giuseppe Lazzati and his commitment to democracy. And of Pier Giorgio Frassati, «whose canonization is now looming for the next Jubilee year», recalls the words of John Paul II who «called him the man of the Beatitudes» and he also said that «in Catholic Action he lived his Christian vocation with joy and pride and committed himself to loving Jesus and seeing in him the brothers he met on his path or that he sought in places of suffering, marginalization and abandonment to make them feel the warmth of his human solidarity and the supernatural comfort of faith in Christ”. And then, at the end of his speech «the Pope summarized the earthly day of Blessed Piergiorgio thus: «“All immersed in the mystery of God and entirely dedicated to the constant service of others”».
The cardinal asks what sanctity the world needs today. And he indicates the models in the witnesses of faith of which Catholic Action is rich. Because “there is no need for new ministries established to carry out their lay role”. We need to ask ourselves how to spend ourselves in everyday life, in the social fabric. And again, citing Frassati as an example, he adds: «In his holiness there is a value of continuity with the tradition of his land: he, in fact, has engaged in the work of defending the faith, through the charity lavished in the field of marginalization, produced by the then nascent industrial context. There is also, however, an element of novelty and it is the fact of having tried to compare the value of faith with the entire range of human experience, working charitably in every area: in the environments of the university, of work, of press (Pier Giorgio collected subscriptions not for his father’s newspaper, but for the Catholic one), of political and party commitment, and wherever it was necessary to defend social freedoms, always trying to conceive and foment associationism, as Christian friendship destined for the birth of a social Catholicism”. There is a need, following this example and as Pope Francis also said in the meeting on 25 April, to live the experiences of the Aci «as moments of communion, moments of co-responsibility, ecclesial moments, in which we infect each other with hugs of affection and fraternal esteem”. Because in the end, to believe in God, as he writes in his work He who believes is not a bourgeois being, Jean de Saint-Cheron, it is enough to remember the words of the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, who lived in 1800. When he was asked «How can I believe in God? Hopkins simply replied: give alms!