THE BICYCLE MARTYR

 

The most recent priest to be beatified (September 26, 2021) , as a martyr from WWII is GIOVANNI  FORNASINI.

Bl. Don Giovanni  was born near Bologna in 1915. He is reported to have been a poor student and, after leaving school, to have worked for a time as a lift boy at Bologna’s Grand Hotel.

 He eventually entered the seminary and was ordained a priest in 1942, at the age of 27. In his homily at his first Mass,  he said: “The Lord has chosen me, rascal among the rascals.”

 Despite beginning his priestly ministry amid the challenges of the Second World War, the blessed gained a reputation as a go-getter. He opened a school for boys at his parish outside Bologna, in the town of Sperticano, and a fellow seminary classmate, Fr. Lino Cattoi, described the young priest as seeming “always to be running.”

 “He was always around trying to free people from their difficulties and to solve their problems. He had no fear. He was a man of great faith and was never shaken.” He travelled on his bicycle to be of help and bring relief to those who were in danger.

When Nazi troops carried out a mass killing of at least 770 Italian civilians in the village of Marzabotto between Sept. 29 and Oct. 5, 1944, he sought to bury the dead.

 After receiving permission from an SS captain, the young priest left on Oct. 13 to bless and bury victims of the Marzabotto massacre, but never returned.

His body was recovered at the site as the war neared its end in April 1945 and an examination revealed that Fr. Giovanni had been brutally beaten before he was killed.

 At his beatification, the Holy Father said:  “A parish priest zealous in charity, he did not abandon his flock during the tragic period of the Second World War, but rather he defended it to the point of bloodshed. May his heroic witness help us to face life’s trials with fortitude.”

 On 19 May 1950, the President of Italy,Luigi Einaudi  conferred upon Don Fornasini posthumously Italy's Gold Medal of Military Valour. The award was presented to his mother, Maria, on 2 June 1951. The citation reads:

In his parish of Sperticano, where all true men fought in the mountains for the freedom of their Fatherland, he was a shining example of Christian charity. Pastor to the old, to the mother, to the bride, to the innocent child, he several times shielded them with his own body against the heinous atrocities of the German SS, saving many lives from death and encouraging all, both the fighters and their families, to heroic resistance. Arrested, miraculously escaping death, he at once and boldly resumed his role as pastor and soldier, first among the ruins and massacres of his destroyed Sperticano, then at San Martino di Caprara; where, however, he was struck down by the ferocity of the enemy. The voice of Faith and of Fatherland, he had dared fiercely to condemn the inhuman German massacres of so many of the weak and of the innocent, thereby calling down upon himself the barbarity of the invader and being slain; he, the Shepherd who had always with the utmost courage protected and guided his flock by his piety and by his example. – San Martino di Caprara, 13 October 1944

 Blessed Giovanni's feast day is October 13