Faith Filled Friday: From Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati

This is a wonderful meditation as a Lenten meditation.  It comes from a letter by Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati on what makes a truly profitable life.  I quote it from the February 2023 edition of Magnificat.

If you have not heard of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, his life is a must to learn.  He came from a rich, well-connected Italian family who secretly helped the poor with his time and money from a young age.  Whatever money he was given, he gave it away.  He was a mountain climber, a student of engineering, a Third Order Dominican, a passionate Catholic, a lover of the Eucharist, a lover of Christ, and he did all this before contracting a form of polio which killed him at the age of twenty-four.  He perhaps lived out the beatitudes as well as any young man could do.  Wherever he went, his joyful smile made friends.  I think of his as the saint of friendship.

I don’t know who he wrote this letter to, but it encapsulates the essence of his Catholic point of view.

 

May peace be in your soul….Every other gift which one possesses in this life is vanity.  It is wonderful to be alive inasmuch as our true life is the life beyond; otherwise who could bear the burden of this life if there weren’t a prize for suffering, an eternal joy; how could one explain the admirable resignation of so many poor creatures who struggle with life and often die in the breach if it weren’t for the certainty of God’s justice?  In the world which has distanced itself from God, there is a lack of peace, but there is also a lack of charity that is true and perfect love.  Maybe if all of us listened more to Saint Paul, human miseries would be slightly diminished….

 

My life is monotonous, but every day I understand better what a grace it is to be Catholic.  Poor unlucky those who don’t have faith: to live without a faith, without a patrimony to defend, without a steady struggle for the truth, is not living but existing.  We must never exist but live, because even through every disappointment we should remember that we are the only ones who possess the truth, we have a faith to sustain, a hope to attain: our homeland.  And therefore let us banish all melancholy that can only exist when the faith is lost.  Human sorrows touch us, but if they are viewed in the light of religion, and thus of self-surrender, they are not harmful but helpful, because they purify the soul of the little and inevitable stains by which we men, due to our wicked nature, dirty ourselves many times.  In this holy Lent, let us lift up our hearts and always go forward for the triumph of the reign of Christ in Society.

 

Cordial greetings in Jesus Christ.

 

            -Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati

 

From Magnificat February 2023

 

From Letters to His Friends and Family, Father Timothy E. Deeter, Tr., 2009, St Pauls Alba House, Staten Island, NY.

 

For a young man, he knew the range of human experience: “Human sorrows touch us, but if they are viewed in the light of religion, and thus of self-surrender, they are not harmful but helpful, because they purify the soul of the little and inevitable stains by which we men, due to our wicked nature, dirty ourselves many times.”  I don’t know how old he was when he wrote that, but there is no way I could have envisioned that in my twenties. 

Let me close with his ending exhortation: “In this holy Lent, let us lift up our hearts and always go forward for the triumph of the reign of Christ in Society.”

Here is a little film clip of his life.

 

I hope he is finally canonized in my lifetime.  He is someone I really admire.