Saint Giovanni Battista Piamarta

He was born in Brescia on November 26, 1841, to a poor family in the parish of Saints Faustinus and Jovita. ³⁵ His father was a barber, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints says, and his mother, a very devout woman with a decisive influence on him, died when he was nine. ³ His maternal grandfather took him in, sent him to school and, in his free hours, to the oratory of Saint Thomas, where the boy's fine soprano voice put him in the choir. ³ Music and singing, the Dicastery says, stayed dear to him and became one of the ways he formed his own boys. ³

After school he was apprenticed as a mattress maker to some relatives. ³ At thirteen he met Don Pancrazio Pezzana, parish priest of Vallio, who saw that he was ready for the priesthood; but poor health and lack of money kept him waiting until he was nineteen to enter the seminary of Brescia. ³ He studied there from 1860 to 1865 and was ordained on December 23, 1865. ³

For almost nineteen years he was a curate, at Carzago Riviera, at Bedizzole and then, for thirteen years, at Sant'Alessandro in Brescia, the last two with Pezzana again as his pastor. ³⁵ The Dicastery lists the work: catechism, preaching, confessions, running the oratory, visits to the poor and the sick, and the care of the church, whose vestments he renewed at his own expense. ³

On October 20, 1883, he was made pastor of Pavone Mella, a parish the Dicastery describes as difficult, where Freemasonry was working to dechristianize the people. ³ The anticlericals fought him, it says, but the people followed him and remembered him as a pastor "zealous, excellent, irreproachable in everything", words translated here from the Italian. ³

The work he is remembered for began in 1886. ³⁵ In the Dicastery's account, his friend Monsignor Pietro Capretti opened an Institute of the "Sons of Mary" in Brescia on December 3, 1886, for the Christian formation and professional training of young people, with Piamarta's collaboration, and it ran into money troubles at once. ³ The Diocese of Brescia's proper Mass says more simply that in 1886 he began the Artigianelli Institute for young workers, especially the poor and orphans. ⁵ For two months he shuttled between his parish and the institute, and then the bishop asked him to give up the parish and take it over; on February 1, 1887, he left Pavone Mella. ³ There were four boys. ³

A year later there was talk of closing it. The Dicastery records what he told the bishop, translated here from the Italian: "No, Your Excellency, I will die here with my boys." ³ By then there were about twenty. ³ Trusting in Providence, it says, he became the real founder of the work, renamed the Artigianelli Institute after Capretti's death. ³ The Holy See's 1997 biography says he prepared hundreds of young men there for working and Christian life, with great sacrifice and difficulty. ⁴

He turned next to the countryside. With Father Giovanni Bonsignori, parish priest of Pompiano, he started the agricultural colony at Remedello, to train farm boys both as Christians and as farmers: in 1895, according to the Dicastery, or ten years after the Artigianelli, according to the Diocese of Brescia. ³⁵ The 1997 biography says it became a point of reference for farming families all over Italy. ⁴

Benedict XVI added Queriniana, the Catholic publishing house, to the list of his works, and the 1997 biography says he founded it to bring Christian thought to young people and to the educated. ¹⁴ In 1900 he founded the Congregation of the Holy Family of Nazareth, approved in 1902, to carry on his works. ³⁴ A women's congregation followed, the Humble Servants of the Lord, for the Christian and professional formation of girls: the Dicastery dates it to 1911 and makes it his foundation, while the Brescia Missal and the 1997 biography say he founded it together with Mother Elisa Baldo. ³⁴⁵

Every source that describes him returns to prayer. Benedict XVI said that when he was overburdened with work he increased the length of his "encounter, heart to heart, with the Lord", and that he preferred to pause before the Blessed Sacrament, meditating on the passion, death and resurrection of Christ. ¹ John Paul II quoted words his contemporaries remembered: "With prayer one is strengthened by the strength of God himself ... Omnia possum". ² The 1997 biography adds that in his humility he thought of himself as an obstacle to God's works, and that he lived poor and died poor. ⁴

His last years, the Dicastery says, were a real calvary: sciatica, heart and circulation trouble, stomach problems, insomnia and paralysis. ³ On April 9, 1913, visiting the colony at Remedello, he had a final attack. ³ He received Viaticum on April 23 and died there at eight in the morning on April 25, 1913, aged seventy-one. ³⁴⁵ Thirteen years later his body was brought back to the church of the Artigianelli in Brescia. ³

John Paul II beatified him in Saint Peter's Square on October 12, 1997, and said of him that a great many boys and young men, thanks to his work, "were able to start out joyfully in life, having learned a skill and, above all, having encountered Jesus". ²³ The cure approved for his canonization was of a man in Fortaleza, Brazil, in 2003. ³ Benedict XVI canonized him on October 21, 2012, with six others, among them Kateri Tekakwitha and Marianne Cope. ¹³ The Roman Martyrology, in the text the Italian bishops print, still calls him blessed, because it was written before 2012. ³⁶

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Giovanni Piamarta, so none is given here. ¹³⁵ The Brescia Missal's prayer for his feast asks for the light he was given "to educate young people to live as Christians in work, in the family and in society", words translated here from the Italian, and that is the clearest statement of what his diocese remembers him for. ⁵

His feast is kept on April 25, the day he died: the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives it as his liturgical memorial, and the Roman Martyrology enters him on that day. ³⁶ The Diocese of Brescia, where he was born and worked, celebrates him a day later, on April 26, with a Mass of its own. ⁵

He began with four boys and a work someone else had founded and nearly lost. ³ His answer to the suggestion of closing it was that he would die there with them. ³ The institute outlived him, and so did the two congregations he left to run it. ³⁴

Benedict XVI made a point that is easy to miss in a list of foundations: when the work grew heavier, Piamarta prayed longer, not less. ¹ John Paul II's quotation says the same thing more bluntly, that with God everything is possible. ²

His holiness was practical in an unusual way. He taught boys to make things and to farm, and treated a trade and the faith as one education. ²⁵ John Paul II counted his reach from the world of work to agriculture, education and publishing. ²

He was the son of a barber and an apprentice mattress maker before he was a priest, and waited years for the seminary for lack of money. ³ The boys he took in were not so different from the boy he had been.