Of course, while wearing the pectoral as a skier number 25 he could not imagine that he would go up to the honors of the altars right in the jubilee year that brings that figure. Exactly one hundred years after his death, that July 4, 1925, after six days of fulminating agony. “The most beautiful day”, for him, as he wrote, because the one in which he would meet the Lord.
Pier Giorgio Frassati was a sportsman, a student, a fans of politics and friendship, a non -bigotie believer. Member of the Fuci, of the Catholic Action, with the card in the pocket of the Popular Party of Don Luigi Sturzo and that of the society of the Loschi types, which he himself had founded to cement friendship with his companions and his street companions. “Robespierre”, his battle name, such as the incorruptible French revolutionary, “the terrible climber”, or “the man of the eight beatitudes”, as John Paul II had called him before he was pope and to beatifying him, in 1990, “Fra Girolamo”, thinking about the Savonarola, from the Dominican tertiary … born in Turin on April 6, 1901 in a family of the Alta Borghesia, the Father Senator. And then ambassador to Berlin, the established painter mother, lives the anxieties, fears and hopes of her time. Between the house of the Piedmontese capital and that of family in Pollone (Biella), he forks his personality and approaches faith. Pointing “upwards”, as he himself writes on the photo that portrays him in climb, abbarbiced with a rock, in Val di Lanzo, just a month before his death.
“You are this book, even in the years Venturi, guide and comfort on the way of honesty, charity and purity,” his mother had written to give him, in Christmas 1913, the imitation of Christ. And he had taken it in question by dedicating himself to prayer, good readings, in search of God. Without ever losing joy and light -heartedness, even when the air at home was tense or when international and national situations became burdensome. Nothing was unrelated to the anxieties of humanity. Since he was a child, when, the chronicles tell, he had started to eat with a small left in a corner because of a serious rash, he was attentive to the needs of others.
“It is holy not because he did stringing things,” explains Roberto Falciola, vice -poster, “but because he lived the ordinarity of his existence in an extraordinary way. Vivified, dominated and nourished by the experience of the love of God that he made daily in prayer and listening to the Word, in the daily Eucharist and in the encounter with the brothers and sisters “.
And it is “this ordinarity that amazes the boys who come here on pilgrimage”, explains Don Luca Bertarelli, parish priest of Pollone. Every year in thousands they visit Villa Ametis, the one built by the maternal grandfather. In the shadow of the great sequoia they sit, listen and ask. Amazed by reviewing, in that young man who died a hundred years ago, their own doubts, fragility and strength, dreams and turbulence. «Above all, they are affected by the relationship with the family, by the great love that Pier Giorgio nourished for his parents, despite the misunderstandings. Here there are last rivers of sincere tears by these young people who, in listening and touching Frassati’s life, had the opportunity to confront themselves with themselves “.
On the first floor of the large family villa, brought from Turin, there is the bedroom where Pier Giorgio died. On his bed, dozens of prayer cards and requests for graces. There are his objects, the picker with whom he climbed, his books, his pipe. There is a small altar, with the candelabra, lit for its funeral vigil, which today burned for collective prayer. And it seems to see him, Pier Giorgio, climb the parish bell tower to play the bells and announce, he who had known him among the first because of the paternal assignment, the end of the First World War. It seems to listen to the pace of the clogs of Parsifal, his black horse, stop in front of the door of the church to allow his knight to make the sign of the cross. Or you imagine it at the Sanctuary of Oropa, at the foot of the Black Madonna of which she was so devoted and that John Paul II wanted to reproduce in the secret garden of the pontifical villas in Castel Gandolfo.
In the small Pollone cemetery, before leaving for Argentina, Mario Bergoglio, the father of Pope Francis, had also gone, who, living near the parish of the Crocetta, in Turin, had known and esteemed him. In 1990 the body, on the occasion of beatification, was translated into the Cathedral of Turin. But thousands of young people were able to greet him during the Jubilee of August when he was transferred to Rome, to Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, the coffin placed in front of the remains of Santa Caterina, of which Pier Giorgio was a great admirer. A gesture of generosity of the family against those who had prepared for the canonization of 3 August then moved to September.
“Many could not afford another ticket to return now,” explains his nephew Wanda Gawronska, “and then we thought of bringing Pier Giorgio to Rome for the Jubilee of young people”. Those who were able, however, postponed the departure to be here, in St. Peter’s Square, to pay homage to a “peer” who had discovered the secret of true joy, the rooting in Christ, and who – underlines Falciola – “dies in the Holy Year to whom he had cared for. And for which he wrote a valid wish even today. That of peace as a true gift of the jubilee year “.
