A choir poses before an image of Pier Giorgio Frassati during a celebration of the centenary of his death, Turin, Italy, Friday, July 4, 2025 / Credit: Courtney Mares/CNA
Turin, Italy, Jul 5, 2025 / 13:00 pm (CNA).
On the 100th anniversary of Pier Giorgio Frassati's death this week, crowds packed into the Turin Cathedral to pray at the tomb of the charismatic young man who is set to be canonized as a saint in September.
The three-day celebration of the centenary, dubbed "Frassati Days," drew pilgrims from the United States, Poland, and Switzerland to Piedmont, the northern Italian region where Frassati lived and left a lasting legacy of faith and charity.
"These 100 years made Frassati a popular young man. Not only in Turin, not only in Piedmont, not only in Italy, but all over the world," Cardinal Archbishop Roberto Repole said during the centenary Mass on July 4.
He described Frassati as "an authentic witness to Christ and the Eternal God" and remembered him as "a natural leader" who loved the mountains and inspired those around him.
Eucharistic adoration followed the evening Mass, with the cathedral remaining open late into the night as young people knelt in silence at the tomb of the man whom John Paul II called "the Man of the Beatitudes."
Born in Turin in 1901 into a prominent family — his father was the founder of the "La Stampa" newspaper and a diplomat — Frassati balanced a deep life of faith with active engagement in politics and service to the poor. He joined the Dominican Third Order, climbed Alpine peaks, and distributed food and medicine to the needy in the poorest parts of Turin. He died on July 4, 1925, from polio at the age of 24, believed to have contracted the disease from one of the people he served.
In the cathedral's front pew for the solemn Mass was Frassati's niece, 93-year-old Giovanna Gilardini.
"He's my uncle," she told CNA. "My mother [Luciana] used to talk to us about Pier Giorgio."
She recalled a moment in 1981 when Frassati's coffin was opened during the beatification process. "I saw him," she said. "He was intact, perfectly intact."
Frassati's body was found to be incorrupt, or preserved from the natural process of decay after death. According to Catholic tradition, incorruptible saints give witness to the truth of the resurrection of the body and the life that is to come. That moment, Gilardini explained, solidified her belief in his sanctity.
"Pier Giorgio helps me a lot [from heaven] all the time," she said.
Just behind her sat her grandson, 14-year-old Pier Giorgio Gilardini, named after the soon-to-be saint. "To live up to his name, I feel like I have to be good," the teenager said. "He inspires me."
The Archdiocese of Turin and the neighboring Diocese of Biella shared responsibility for the commemorations, just as Frassati had split his own time between the city and the mountains. While he lived most of the year in Turin, his summers were spent with his grandparents in the mountain town of Pollone, where he hiked and prayed in the Alps.
On Thursday evening, a vigil Mass was celebrated under the shadow of those Alps on the grounds of Villa Ametis, the Frassati family home in Pollone, by Bishop Roberto Farinella of Biella, who described the centenary as a celebration of Frassati's "birth into heaven."
The Mass took place beneath a towering sequoia tree planted by Frassati's grandfather — a tree that the young Pier Giorgio used to climb as a boy.
"Here everything speaks to us about Pier Giorgio," said Father Luca Bertarelli, the local parish priest in Pollone. "The house, the yard, the sequoia which he used to climb, his pickax, these candelabras that were in his room for his last communion, the viaticum before his death."
"But what speaks to us most are the pilgrims," he added. "I have met in these years thousands of pilgrims, especially young people… and I have also seen some tears that flowed from their eyes because of the holy life of Pier Giorgio."
"Pier Giorgio really is the saint for today," Bertarelli said.
Eucharistic adoration under the stars followed the Pollone Mass, with candles illuminating the façade of the Frassati home. Passages from Frassati's letters were read aloud until late into the night.
Among the attendees were Cedric Ebiner and his brother Vincent, who drove from Switzerland to be there. The Ebiner brothers began the day with a climb up Mount Mucrone, following the Poggio Frassati trail Pier Giorgio once hiked himself.
"I have a big devotion to Pier Giorgio," said Cedric, a Swiss native who now teaches French and Latin at Loyola High School in Los Angeles.
"Saints are just like other people—the more you know about them, the closer you can get to them, and so just visiting the place where they lived gets you closer to them. … being there just adds to it," he said.
Growing up, he added, "we did a lot of hiking, mountain climbing… so that aspect of him being an outdoors kind of guy is really appealing. … He's a real man."
In Turin, young people took part in the "Frassatour," visiting key sites in Frassati's spiritual life, from the Church of St. Dominic, where he discovered his vocation as a lay Dominican, to the Sanctuary of the Consolata, a Marian shrine he frequented.
Paolo Reineri, who helped lead the tour and wrote a children's book on Frassati, said he wanted kids to know that Frassati "is a friend who can be with them and inspire them." He added: "He is an inspiration because he found time to do a lot of good — and he always found time for God."
Frassati's canonization, alongside Blessed Carlo Acutis, will take place September 7, making them the first new saints declared by Pope Leo XIV.
Germana Moro, president of the Pier Giorgio Frassati Association in Turin, credited much of the progress in his sainthood cause to Frassati's sister Luciana. "It was thanks to Luciana's immense amount of work… that her brother's beatification process was reopened," she said, noting that Luciana had gathered more than 900 testimonies about her brother's life.
"Pier Giorgio teaches us that without constant deep union with the Blessed Sacrament… we will not survive," Moro said. "Celebrations are not enough if they do not help us follow the path of faith that he walked before us and whose footprints he left clearly visible."
Christine Wohar, president of Frassati USA, a Nashville-based nonprofit apostolate dedicated to spreading awareness of his life, reflected on the timing of the upcoming canonization.
"We cannot improve on God's plans.?This is certainly the case with the centenary of Pier Giorgio's death, the diocesan Year of Frassati that is concluding in Turin on his feast day, and the fact that he will soon be canonized," she said.
"What is more significant is that it is happening in a jubilee year because it was also a jubilee year [when Frassati died] in 1925. And how appropriate that it is a year dedicated to hope—as devotees of Frassati have hoped and prayed for so long to be able to put 'saint' in front of his name."
