Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901-1925)

Until the moment he awakened after nine days in a coma, Kevin Becker had never heard of a young saint-in-the-making named Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, but it is now a name he will never forget.

Writing for Aleteia, Will Duquette reports on Kevin's astonishing story which began when he fell from the second floor of a house he shared with a few college roommates in 2011. The fall fractured his skull in five places and damaged every lobe in his brain. Doctors did everything they could to save him, but the prognosis was grim and it was believed that if he managed to survive, he would likely suffer from severe cognitive problems.

Kevin not only survived, but less than three weeks after his injury he walked out of the hospital, slung a bag over his shoulder and walked to the car, all the while tossing a football with his brother. After a series of tests, doctors were amazed to report that he was functioning as if he had never been injured.

How could this be?

Doctors could not explain the phenomenon, but his mother soon realized what had happened.

She put the pieces together after Kevin told her about something that had happened when he was still in the coma. He said that he had “woken up” in the house he shared with his roommates and heard someone downstairs. Because he was usually the first person awake in the morning, he went downstairs to investigate and found a young man sitting in the living room.

“Who are you?”

“I’m George, your new roommate.”

“That can’t be. I already have two roommates.”

“They aren’t around anymore," George said.

“Oh.”

Even though he loathed staying indoors, Kevin spent the rest of the day with George because his new roommate would not let him leave the house. Every time he tried to leave, George would stop him. The two fought about it, in a brotherly way, but George was adamant. Kevin finally gave up and decided to pass the time doing homework or playing a soccer video game with George called “FIFA”.

Eventually he woke up and found himself in the hospital.

When Kevin told this story to his mother, she asked him to describe the man. What Kevin told her fit the description of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, a Lay Dominican who died of polio in 1925 at the age of 24 after a life dedicated to serving others. Although Kevin was not aware of it, while her son still lay in a coma, a relative sent her a picture of Blessed Pier and suggested that she pray to him for his intercession. She did so and lovingly placed the picture at the bedside of her son.

Kevin woke up the next day.

When she showed Kevin the picture, he instantly recognized the man as the “new roommate” he had “seen” in the living room that day.

It’s even more interesting to note that Kevin had never heard of Blessed Pier before that moment.

“They say that an encounter with a saint can change your life; it changed Kevin’s,” writes Duquette. “Not only was he completely healed, he says that he’s better than he was before his injury. In school he’d always been the clown sitting in the back row making smart-aleck remarks and not paying attention to his schoolwork. From the moment he woke, his studies became important to him, and his grades improved remarkably.”

The records of Kevin’s case are now with the Vatican and his miraculous recovery may very well be the miracle that leads to Frassati’s canonization.

If this miracle is approved, it will not be the first time Blessed Pier intervened to save the life of a young man. In 1933, a 40 year old man named Domenico Sellan was suffering from a tubercular disease of the spine, was paralyzed, and on his deathbed when a priest visited. Even though it was less than ten years after Blessed Pier died, the priest gave Domenico a small prayer card and suggested he pray to the holy young man who cause for canonization was already underway. Domenico took his advice and was healed.

It wouldn’t be until 1989 that the documentation of this miracle received approval and Pier Giorgio Frassati was declared Blessed the following year.

Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, pray for us!