Today July 4

Today is the feast of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901 - 1925). There are other saints today, but since it is also Independence Day and ours is a young country and Blessed Pier is a young saint, a real saint for the young, we are going to go with him. He is even called the "patron of youth for the new millennium." He was a mountain climber and a daily communicant and had been an altar boy in his youth. Who knows what he might have been had he lived? I imagine he might have become a priest. But as it is, he is a wonderful layman, a saint for us all. I love that he was a member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. He was also a peaceful demonstrator and even held up one end of a banner when the previous holder was hauled off to prison (making him like Father Benedict Groeschel, who took hold of one end of a banner reading "NY Orthodox Rabbis for Life" when the previous man was arrested. "I made quite an incongruous picture there in my habit!" he remembers.)

Pier was a really cool guy, a soccer player as well as a theater and opera lover, and a great-hearted man. What did he do for the sick and the poor? The better question is what DIDN'T he do? As a child he gave away his shoes to a little boy who came with his mother to beg at the door of his home. (The Frassatis were wealthy and involved in progressive [anti-fascist] politics at a high level.) He gave his coat to a man in Berlin (his father became ambassador to Germany at one point), even though it was 12 below zero and he could have died of hypothermia himself. Each day he gave his trolley money to the poor and ran all the way in order to be home by dinnertime. He used his graduation money to buy food, medicine and rent for the poor -- young, old, men, women, Catholic, non-Catholic, it didn't matter. He reached out to all who were sick and struggling. He contracted tuberculosis from the tenement residents he visited and died at the age of 24, a true believer to the end. He said: "It is not those who suffer violence that should fear, but those who practice it."