Yesterday, I attended a meeting in preparation for the coming PREP 7 year at St. Matthew’s. We looked at the schedule, discussed lesson topics, shared our hopes for the students and ourselves as a team.
Our conversation led to us talking about a way to identify each discussion group by a particular saint. For example, group 7 might be “House Aquinas,” or group 3, “House Siena.” We’ve done this in previous years and it worked well to get the kids curious about the saints or at least to begin thinking of their own patron saint for confirmation.
One suggestion that got thrown out was to name each group by a young saint or beatified person. Saints like Dominic Savio, Agnes of Rome, or soon to be canonized, Bl. Carlo Acutis. Another name which also entered the fold was Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati.
I didn’t know much about him except that he was young and he loved to climb. So while we continued to talk about different ideas for the PREP class, I decided to look more into the life he lived.
What I found was a speech he wrote titled “To the Members of “Catholic Youth” of Pollone” delivered on Sunday, July 29, 1923. While I read, I was taken aback by the depth and clarity of the words written by someone not much older than me. I could almost imagine him as that super wise former youth leader sitting in the pews before daily Mass, or standing in line for confession, eyes closed and his face serene in prayer.
Here is the speech in its entirety if you’d like to give it a read: https://www.usccb.org/blessed-pier-giorgio-frassati
What I’d like to do is highlight certain lines he wrote and offer my own reflection on them. However regardless of the weight in his words, I’m reminded that there is no greater weight than what Jesus carried on the cross when he suffered and died for all of mankind.
The Jesus who Bl. Frassati befriended, adored, and served in his life, is the same Jesus calling you and I to greater heights until the greatest height of heaven is reached.
“Prayer is the noble supplication which we lift up to the throne of God. It is the most efficient means to obtain from God the graces which we need, and especially the strength of persevering in these times, in which the hatred of the sons of the devil is breaking out violently against the sheep who are faithful to the fold.”
In this section, Bl. Frassati advocates for the truth we might often hear yet not always remember: prayer doesn’t help our relationship with God, it is our relationship with God. I’m guilty of viewing prayer as a tool more than a way of life. To be in constant communication and connection with God is the only way to obtain the consistency in virtue and goodness that is required for holiness. Prayer is what opens hearts to receive God’s love and mercy. Resting in His presence, listening for His voice, and forgetting ourselves in a spirit of humility grants us graces we might not even realize until they bear fruits of action which lead to gratitude: a return of praise to Him for the share of grace we first received in prayer.
It also reminds me of something Fr. Mike Schmitz once said about prayer, how every prayer is a response. We never initiate a conversation with God, we respond to Him. He not only supplies grace in prayer but supplies the grace to pray. It’s only a matter of how open and receptive we are to what He already desires to give.
“Because true happiness, young people, does not consist in the pleasures of the world and in earthly things, but in peace of conscience which we can have only if we are pure in heart and in mind.”
True happiness is not something we obtain for ourselves but rather what God gives us according to His goodness. The correlation Bl. Frassati makes between happiness and peace offers insight into how saints and martyrs endured their suffering, by being “pure in heart and in mind,” and as a result, experiencing the “peace of conscience” which Bl. Frassati describes.
“After having fortified our spirit by applying ourselves with great diligence to works of mercy, and after having intensely studied the questions which are troubling us, then we can throw ourselves into the apostolate. And there are three distinct apostolates.”
Apostolate: “every activity of the Mystical Body” that aims “to spread the Kingdom of Christ over all the earth” (CCC 863)
The Apostolate of Good Example
“We Catholics must strive to have our whole life guided by Christian moral law. Then there is the apostolate of charity by going among those who suffer and comforting them, among the unfortunate and saying a comforting word to them, because the Catholic religion is based on charity which is nothing other than the most perfect Love.”
When I think of charity, it’s easy for my mind to immediately drift off to the financially poor and physically impoverished of the community. But those opportunities in which I could be charitable to them can be few and far between. Now choosing to love my family, coworkers, or people I see on a more regular basis, is a different story.
St. Teresa of Calcutta said at the end of her 1984 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, “And so, my prayer for you is that truth will bring prayer in our homes, and from the foot of prayer will be that we believe that in the poor it is Christ. And we will really believe, we will begin to love. And we will love naturally, we will try to do something. First in our own home, next door neighbour, in the country we live, in the whole world.”
Sometimes those closest to us are the ones in most need of our charity. Not just any charity but the charity of Jesus’ perfect love which casts out all fear (1 John 4:18).
“The Apostle St. Paul says, “The charity of Christ needs us,” and without this fire, which little by little must destroy our personality so that our heart beats only for the sorrows of others, we would not be Christians, much less Catholics.”
The Apostolate of Persuasion
“Young people, approach your colleagues at work who live their lives away from the Church and spend their free time not in healthy pastimes, but in vices. Persuade those unfortunate people to follow the ways of God, strewn with many thorns, but also many roses.”
“We must sacrifice everything for everything: our ambitions, indeed our entire selves, for the cause of the Faith.”
When we unite ourselves to Jesus, we unite ourselves to His suffering and experience the refining fire of self-giving sacrifice.
As many gifts and talents I might have, in God’s eyes, none are more valuable than the gift of my heart in which He made for Himself. I believe that the only way for me to be completely His is to remove myself from myself. On most days, that’s difficult to do. But none of it will change the truth that I was made by Him, for Him. As I currently find myself in the process of former things passing away, I have hope in the renewal He promises to bring.
A Happy Eternity
“In order for our life to be Christian, it must be a continual renunciation, a continual sacrifice which however is not burdensome when only we think about what these few years passed in sorrow are, compared with a happy eternity, where joy will have no measure nor end, and where we will enjoy a peace beyond anything we could imagine.”
Someone once shared a prayer in a session I attended about evangelizing to young people. The prayer went something like this.
“May they forget me and only remember You.”
I recall writing this down in my journal in a big, thick font. May they forget me and only remember You.
Bl. Frassati echoes that prayer in his words. He compares the shortness of the suffering in this life to the permanence of happiness in the life to come; describing it as “a happy eternity.”
That description brings hope, and it also brings a fresh sense of perspective. What are the sorrows of this life to compare to the peace that the next will bring?
With humanity comes mortality. The assurance that one day all of this will end. The physical sensations, the expressed and unexpressed emotions, they’ll all just stop, and our journey on this world will reach a conclusion.
But the journey with Christ does not have a terminal station.
St. Padre Pio was an Italian priest with a great number of documented miracles and a man given many spiritual gifts by God. One of these gifts was the ability to foresee future events of individuals.
One such individual was a police officer. St. Padre Pio told this man, perfectly healthy and in the physical prime of his life, that he would die peacefully in two weeks at his father’s home.
To console the police officer, he said to him, “What is life but a pilgrimage? We are on a journey, my son.”
During the following two weeks, the police officer settled his affairs, spent time with his family, and passed away in his father’s house, just as St. Padre Pio foretold.
I read this story just as I was about to leave for work and something about it stayed with me. I think also the fact that I still remember it as I’m writing this proves the worth of its meaning and the question it asks so well.
“What is life but a pilgrimage?”
To Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati, it would’ve been a climb taken up a mountain.
He was well known for being an avid mountaineer. Bl. Frassati and his friends often went on hikes as a group with opportunities for prayer, liturgies, and conversations of faith going up and down from the summit. These experiences proved to be a reflection of the life he lived which itself was a reflection of Christ who is alive today.
On the last climb before his sudden death, Bl. Frassati signed off on the back of a photograph, “Verso L’Alto” which means “to the heights.”
What he wrote reminds us that there is no journey is greater than the one we take with Christ.
The highest summit we can reach is that of holiness: the height of heaven.
You look up and see that there are already people there. Many silhouettes of men and women overshadowed by the figure of the cross.
If you look closely at their faces, you can seem them urging you on. Waving their hands, pointing to the path.
Every step upwards brings you a step closer to joining them. Every step a closer step to eternity.
Verso L’Alto
