He will be canonised with Carlo Acutis on 7 September. A joyful character and lover of nature, Pier Giorgio renounced his privileged position to dedicate his life to the poor. He inspired thousands of youths, relatable in his humble lifestyle yet blessed with an extraordinary personality.

Born into a well-off family in April 1901. His father, Alfredo, owned the famous Italian newspaper La Stampa, served in the Italian Senate, and was Italian ambassador to Germany. His mother, Adelaide, was an artist whose works were sought after by Italian royalty.
One can imagine that such a child, with only one sibling (a sister born in August 1902), could have grown to be a spoilt brat. Instead, he was generous with all that he had. He gave the very shoes off his feet to a woman begging with her barefoot child and persuaded his mother to care for a drunk man who turned up on the Frassati doorstep.

He was “just one of the boys.” Archive

And lest we imagine that this was all due to a pious ethos in the household, the story goes that his father, an atheist, had turned that drunk man away. A Catholic influence saw him receive his first Holy Communion in 1911. Young Frassati seems to have been a bit of a class joker, which led to him failing his exams.
He was then sent to a Jesuit school for private tuition. Perhaps this Jesuit influence shaped what he would become in his teens and early twenties. His track record is one that most teenage boys and young men will never achieve; yet while we read his inspirational words and note his close following of the Beatitudes (St John Paul II called him “The Man of the Eight Beatitudes”), there is an overriding impression that he exuded the notion that he was
“just one of the boys.”

Choices of life.
The choices he made in his life have the power to “awaken us from our lethargy”. Firstly, there was his spiritual life. If we remember that his father was an avowed atheist, it is most likely that he was sent to the Jesuit school simply to get better exam results. But he was open to all that Catholicism had to offer and joined the Marian Sodality and the Apostleship of Prayer. At a time when it was rarely permitted, he impressed the clerical hierarchy sufficiently to allow him to receive daily Communion. The fact that as a teenager, he sought this is evidence enough of the depth of his faith. Nor was he reticent about sharing that faith with his friends.

Pier Giorgio Frassati (C) with friends. Archive

When he was 17, he joined the St Vincent de Paul Society and his free time was spent serving the sick and those in need, caring for orphans, and for returning World War I soldiers. He studied to become a mining engineer at the Royal Polytechnic University of Turin. He was not following in either Dad’s or Mum’s footsteps, but he confided in a friend that he could “serve Christ better among the miners”. He joined the Catholic Student Foundation, but to participate in political activism, he also became a member of a group called Catholic Action. This was after all the young man who had said, “Charity is not enough; we need reform.” And to underpin all of that, he became active in the People’s Party which promoted the Catholic social teaching that followed Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum.

Care for the poor.
He gave of his cash, and he gave of himself. The family owned a holiday home at Pollone in the countryside near Turin. Pier Giorgio didn’t join the family, he devoted himself instead to caring for the marginalised, the poor, the sick. Of the summer exodus from the city, he said, “If everybody leaves Turin, who will take care of the poor?” However, he did have his hiding place from the city. Pier Giorgio was a skilled mountaineer, swimmer and athlete. He climbed mountains such as the Grand Tournalin (3,379 metres or 11,086 feet) and Monte Viso, which is the 10^th highest mountain in the Alpine range, and invited friends along on what seemed to occasionally become spiritual retreats. But, as regards “normality”, he also enjoyed the theatre and films that met the standards of his moral code.On June 30, 1925, Frassati experienced a severe headache, back pains and a fever after his boat trip with friends on the River Po. He kept these symptoms to himself because his grandmother had died that day, and he didn’t want to add to his mother’s emotional burden. It wasn’t until July 2 that a doctor had to be summoned because he could not get up. Paralysed by polio, he died on July 4, having given his final instructions to his sister and receiving the Last Rites. As he breathed his last breath in his mother’s arms, he said, “May I breathe forth my soul in peace with you.”

The funeral of Pier Giorgio Frassati. Archive

Thousands of people lined the streets when his funeral cortege passed on its way to the Frassati family mausoleum in Pollone. These were the people who soon began to petition for this young man to become a saint. By 1932, the Church had decided to begin the process of canonisation, and by 1938 there was agreement on all fronts that Pier Giorgio Frassati had met all the appropriate criteria, including a miracle occurring after his death.
Frassati was proclaimed Venerable on 23 October 1987, when Pope John Paul II issued a decree confirming that he had lived a Christian life of “heroic virtue”, a concept required for beatification.  By that time, his remains had been removed from the family vault and placed in the Turin Cathedral. When they were inspected, they were found to be incorrupt.  He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 20 May 1990.

A joyous ‘normal’ youngster.
One hundred years after his death and as we approach his canonisation, today’s young people are on record saying that he inspires them because he was just like them; that “saints” aren’t usually as “normal” as Pier Giorgio. Perhaps we read too much into what other saints may have been like: if Gen Z and Gen Alpha had been contemporaries of St Francis, for example, they may have found him inspirational in his normality as well as in his extraordinariness. So perhaps we need to look more deeply into Pier Giorgio’s extraordinariness—and rest assured, he was indeed extraordinary. So extraordinary that two Popes have noted what an inspiration he is for young people.

Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis will be canonised together in St Peter’s Square, Rome, on 7 September 2025. Archive

The late Pope Francis placed him among the twelve exemplary saints for all young people in his apostolic exhortation, Christus Vivit, including him among those “who devoted their lives to Christ… precious reflections of the young Christ.” He added “their radiant witness encourages us and awakens us from our lethargy” (CV 49). Pope Francis also echoed St John Paul II when he said that Frassati “was a young man filled with a joy that swept everything along with it, a joy that overcame many difficulties in his life (CV 60).
In a decree on Nov. 25, 2024 Pope Francis recognized the miraculous healing of a seminarian of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles — who was ordained a priest in June 2023.  He will be canonised with Carlo Acutis on 7 September 2025.

 Marian Pallister