Pier Giorgio Frassati, the boy who loved to take his friends to the mountains to push their gaze “upward,” will be declared a saint next year. The young Blessed from Turin, a lover of God and mankind, will be canonized during the Jubilee of 2025.

The big announcement was made during the afternoon of May 2, 2024 by the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, who spoke during the XVIII National Assembly of Italian Catholic Action, in Sacrofano. “I would like to tell you that the canonization of Blessed Piergiorgio Frassati is now clear on the horizon and is forthcoming for the next Jubilee Year,” said the cardinal, whose speech was interrupted by a long applause from the thousand CA members present.

“In the homily for the rite of his beatification rite,” the prefect added, citing Frassati among the most luminous figures of the saints who grew up in Catholic Action, which took place on May 20, 1990, St. John Paul II called him a man of the Beatitudes; he also said that “in Catholic Action he lived his Christian vocation with joy and pride and was committed to loving Jesus and seeing in him the brothers and sisters he met along the way. Frassati, who was born in Turin in 1901 and died at the age of 24, was a “wonderful model of Christian life,” said Semeraro, who lived his youth, quoting John Paul II, “completely immersed in the mystery of God and dedicated to the constant service of his neighbor.”

The young Blessed of Turin, son of Alfredo Frassati, historical director of La Stampa of Turin, was involved from a very young age in the active laity, and in particular in Catholic Action and the Italian Catholic University Federation, growing in Christian faith and in the desire to serve the poorest. He is considered one of the “social saints” of Turin, like Don Giovanni Bosco and Don Giuseppe Cottolengo, although he was not yet formally a saint, because of his life dedicated to the most fragile and marginalized. “In Piergiorgio’s holiness – continued Semeraro – there is a value of continuity with the tradition of his land: he, in fact, was grafted into the work of defending the faith, through the charity lavished in the field of marginalization.” At the age of 19 Frassati had joined the Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul, to help the most needy, and at the age of 21 he became a Dominican tertiary.

Blessed was a young man among young people, a friend of all, a lover of sports, poetry and mountaineering. “However, there is also an element of novelty,” the prefect concluded, “and that is the fact that he tried to compare the value of faith with the whole of human experience, working charitably in all areas: At the university, in the workplace, in the press (Pier Giorgio collected subscriptions not for his father’s newspaper, but for the Catholic one), of political and partisan commitment, and everywhere it was necessary to defend social freedoms, always seeking to conceive and encourage associationism, as a Christian friendship aimed at the birth of a social Catholicism.”

Last Thursday, April 25, during the audience in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis stressed, added Semeraro, that “the life of associations finds its common denominator precisely in the embrace of charity.”

Source: https://www.avvenire.it/