Saint Artemide Zatti

He was born at Boretto, in the province of Reggio Emilia, on October 12, 1880, to Louis Zatti and Albina Vecchi, a farming family. ⁵⁶ He knew work early: by nine, the Salesians say, he was already earning his keep as a hired hand on the farms. ⁵⁶ In 1897 poverty drove the family to Argentina, where an uncle had found good work at Bahía Blanca. ³⁵ The Holy See's biography says Artemide, then seventeen, worked in a hotel and then in a brick factory. ³

The family went to the parish the Salesians ran in Bahía Blanca, and Pope Francis, who had read his biography, singled them out as an exception among the emigrants of the time: they kept up their faith, prayed together at home and stayed close to the priests. ²³ Artemide helped the parish priest, Father Carlo Cavalli, especially in visiting the sick, and under his guidance chose the Salesian life. ²³⁵

The Holy See's biography says the Salesians accepted him as a candidate for the priesthood in 1900, at nineteen; the Salesians and ANS say he was twenty, and that Bishop John Cagliero accepted him as an aspirant for the house at Bernal. ³⁵⁶⁷ He struggled with the studies, having left school long before. ³ At Bernal he was given a young priest with tuberculosis to look after, and caught the disease himself. ³⁵⁷ The Salesians' calendar says the priest died in 1902 and that Artemide fell ill on the day he was to receive the clerical habit. ⁶

Father Cavalli had him sent to Viedma, on the Río Negro, for the better climate and for its mission hospital. ³⁵⁶ The hospital was run by a Salesian priest with long medical experience whom the Holy See's biography calls Evaristo Garrone, and Pope Francis, the Salesians and ANS call Evasio. ²³⁵⁷ Garrone, the Holy See says, never turned away a poor man who could not pay. ³ He told Artemide to promise Mary Help of Christians that if she healed him he would spend his life on the sick. ²³⁵

In 1915, at the unveiling of a monument to Garrone in Viedma, Zatti gave the account himself, and Pope Francis read it out to the Salesians: "I BELIEVED, because I knew by reputation that Mary Help of Christians helped him in a visible way. PROMISED, because it was always my desire to be of help in something to my neighbour. And, God having listened to his servant, HEALED." ² The Salesians remember it in three words: "I believed, I promised, I recovered." ⁵

He recovered and gave up the priesthood, which the Salesians say cost him a great deal, to become a Salesian brother, a coadjutor. ³⁵ The Holy See's biography says only that he was professed in 1908. ³ The Salesians' profile gives his first profession as January 11, 1908, and his perpetual profession as February 8, 1911; ANS and the Salesians' calendar put the perpetual profession in 1908. ⁵⁶⁷

He began in the pharmacy attached to the hospital. ⁵⁶⁷ When Garrone died, in 1911 according to the Holy See and in 1913 according to the Salesians, the whole hospital became his responsibility. ³⁵ The Holy See lists the jobs: pharmacist, nurse, operating-room assistant, keeper of the accounts and head of personnel. ³ He kept Garrone's rule that "he who has little, pays little and the one who has nothing pays nothing", and, like Don Bosco, made Providence the first entry in his budget. ³⁶⁷ In 1913 he led the building of a new hospital. ³⁶

The Salesians' calendar preserves an account of his day. He was up at half past four for meditation and Mass, then visited every patient, then rode his bicycle out to the sick around the town. ⁶ After lunch he played bocce with the convalescents; in the afternoon he made the rounds again; until eight he worked in the pharmacy, and until eleven at night he studied medicine, before some spiritual reading and sleep, "but was always available for anyone who called for help." ⁶ He went, the Salesians' profile says, to the shacks on the outskirts of Viedma and across the river to Patagones, at any hour and in any weather, and charged nothing. ⁵

He saw Christ in his patients, and said so plainly. Asking the sisters for clothes for a new boy, he would say: "Sister, do you have a dress for a 12-year-old Jesus?" ⁵ People remembered him carrying the body of a patient who had died in the night on his shoulders to the mortuary, praying the De profundis, so that the others would not see. ¹⁵ Sister Antonieta Böhm, a Daughter of Mary Help of Christians who knew him in his last years, recalled that they called him the Father Doctor, always in a white coat and with his bicycle, and that once, finding no bed for a dying man he had brought in, he gave the man his own and slept on the floor. ⁸

The sources do not make him solemn. Sister Böhm remembered his joy and his high, ringing voice, and that every Sunday he had a new hymn to Our Lady ready for his patients. ⁸ One doctor at the hospital, inclined not to believe in God, said that his disbelief faltered when he saw Brother Zatti. ⁵ The Salesians also report, as something "it's said", that the only five days of rest he ever had were spent in prison, after a prisoner escaped from the hospital and he was blamed for it; he was acquitted. ⁵

In 1941, the Holy See says, the hospital he had built was demolished to make room for the residence of the bishop of the newly founded diocese. ³ Sister Böhm said he suffered over it, and that the patients had to be moved to a farm twenty blocks away. ⁸ Pope Francis named both houses, the hospitals of San José and of San Isidro, as places "where God's love irradiated". ²

In 1950 he fell: from a ladder, the Holy See says, while climbing to the roof to fix a leaking water tank; from a ladder, say the Salesians; on the stairs, says their calendar. ³⁵⁶ The examinations that followed found cancer, which, according to the Salesians and the Dicastery, he diagnosed himself. ⁵⁹ He kept working for some months more. ⁵⁹ Sister Böhm was present when he received the anointing of the sick, and recalled that he asked for every solemnity, explained the sacrament to his patients gathered around him, and sent away a nurse with an injection for the pain: "the pain is mine, I don't give it to anyone." ⁸ He died on March 15, 1951, and is buried in the Salesian chapel at Viedma. ³⁶

John Paul II beatified him in Saint Peter's Square on April 14, 2002, the first Salesian brother who was not a martyr to be raised to the altars. ⁴⁹ He spoke of "a passionate, competent and loving service to the sick" and of "his almost fifty years in Viedma". ⁴ Pope Francis canonized him on October 9, 2022, together with Bishop Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, after the cure of a man in the Philippines who had suffered a stroke in 2016 was recognized as a miracle. ¹⁹ Cured of tuberculosis, Francis said, "he devoted his entire life to serving others, caring for the infirm with tender love." ¹

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Artemide Zatti, so none is given here. ¹²³⁵⁹ Pope Francis did tell the Salesians that he regards him as "an intercessor for vocations": as Jesuit provincial in Argentina he asked his prayers for vocations to the brothers of the Society of Jesus, and the number of young brothers, he said, increased significantly. ²

Saint Artemide Zatti's feast is kept on November 13, as a memorial of the Salesian family. ⁷⁸ The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints lists it as his liturgical memorial, the Salesian news agency published the liturgical texts for "the dedicated liturgical day, Nov. 13", and the Salesians' calendar marks it every year. ⁶⁷⁹ It is not the day he died, which was March 15. ³⁵

Pope Francis made gratitude the key to him. Zatti, he said, "wanted to say his own 'thank you' by taking upon himself the wounds of others." ¹ The promise he made as a sick young man was kept for the rest of his life, and he told it in three verbs. ²⁵

He wanted to be a priest and became a brother instead, and the Salesians do not hide that the change cost him. ⁵ Francis, who prayed to him for vocations to the brothers, described them as men who do not aspire to promotions, "because all the richness is there." ²

His holiness was a working day, from half past four in the morning until eleven at night, spent on a bicycle and at a pharmacy counter. ⁶ The people who left accounts of him remembered his good humor and his singing as well as the work. ⁵⁸

When it was his turn to be the patient, he refused the injection and explained the sacrament to the others. ⁸ He had spent forty years at other people's bedsides. ³