I first came across Piero Frassati about ten years ago, when a young seminarian gave me a copy of his biography and told me how much he inspired him. Indeed, Piero’s brief life was a homily far better than I could ever preach on Jesus’ demand that we ‘pick up our crosses and follow him.’
This was because Piero did not see the cross as something to be feared, but as the way to find Jesus in the poor and in everyone who suffers. And by offering to carry their cross with them, even for a little while, he was able to walk with Jesus himself.
As a little boy, Piero Giorgio once overheard one of the sisters say that Jesus was not only present in the consecrated host received at Communion, but also in the poor. So when his relatives gave him gifts of money for his First Communion, he told his mother he wanted to give it away to people who had nothing to eat.
Another time, walking home from school, he met a boy with no shoes. Piero gave him his own shoes and walked home barefoot. His father was furious, but little Piero was simply puzzled. The boy didn’t have shoes. He gave him his shoes. What could be wrong with that?
When Piero began attending daily Mass, his care for the poor became even more consistent. As he later wrote to a friend: “Jesus comes to me every morning in Holy Communion, and I repay Him in my small way by visiting His poor.”
His father was a good man but never trusted the Church. He was a journalist who helped found one of Italy’s largest newspapers. They say he once lost his temper one winter when 13-year-old Piero was riding the streetcar home from school. He noticed a woman shivering outside by a snowbank and gave her his streetcar fare to buy food and then walked the last three miles home in the snow!
He would never tell these stories himself, however, and lived the life of a normal teenager. He enjoyed hiking and skiing, and perhaps the most famous picture of him is on top of a mountain smoking a pipe with his friends. He played soccer, told jokes, pulled pranks, and loved spirited debates. But quietly and simply, his friends recalled, he just naturally sought to help others by picking up their crosses and carrying them with them.
Every day after high school he would stop in poor neighborhoods on his way home—often facing his father’s wrath for being late to supper. He regularly spent his small allowance on bread, food, and medicine, which he quietly delivered to families in need. When a friend once asked him why he did this, he explained that the cross is not some distant object but what we are called to carry every day in prayer, sacrifice, and love. “Our life,” he wrote, “must be a continual preparation for heaven; the cross is the ladder that leads us there.”
I could also tell you about his joining the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, or how he decided to study engineering so he could be near the miners who suffered so much, or how near the end of his life he devoted himself to visiting the sick—especially those whom everyone else avoided for fear of catching polio.
Indeed, he did contract polio himself, but would not stay in bed, since his grandmother was dying at the same time and he wanted to care for her needs. Eventually, however, the disease overcame him—or perhaps not. For just before he died, barely able to move, he scrawled a shaky note asking a friend to deliver medicine to one of the poor he regularly visited. That note—almost illegible because of his paralysis—was the last thing he wrote. It summed up his whole life: even in his final agony, he was thinking of the poor.
He died 100 years ago this summer, after which thousands of poor people came to his funeral. In the few years God gave him on this earth, he taught us what it truly means to pick up your cross and follow the Lord.
