«Listen, if you want me to be a priest that’s fine, but you have to give me the love for the vocation because now I don’t have it,» he asked his Father God with all the confidence of a son.
Good friends, a youth group in the parish, the prudent and calm advice of people that God placed at his side, and the joyful and dedicated life of other seminarians, were decisive for this young Italian to say Yes to the Lord.
Today he is a seminarian of the Work of Jesus High Priest community and studies at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. But to get here he had to break some barriers, such as thinking that the seminary was the closest thing to a prison or even suffering harassment for being a Christian.
A special moment at 14 years old
Giacomo enjoyed a happy childhood in Riccione, in the province of Rimini. Along with his parents and his sister, he attended Mass on Sundays, more out of tradition than devotion and without ever really understanding its true meaning.
The great turning point in his life was at the age of 14, when he began to be part of the parish youth group, the Guardian Angels, a group desired by all the children who attended catechism.
«The youth group represented the opportunity to meet many other young people of the same age with whom to have healthy fun and share good experiences. So one of the big dreams at that age came true: I joined the youth group together with my best friends and got to know 70 or 80 other people. It was one of the largest youth groups in Riccione, to the point that in the camps we organized every year in the Dolomite mountains there were always a hundred of us », he recalls with emotion.
«I thought the seminary was like prison»
Giacomo’s passion was music, a hobby that he shared with other boys in the group. One of them had a seminarian brother – now a priest – from the Work of Jesus High Priest community.
«I remember that moment when he told me that his brother was a seminarian. We were running on the beach, and it seemed to me that being a seminarian was something totally foreign to me. How is it possible for a young man to decide to enter the seminary? For me, it was a place that had nothing to envy of prison: you study all day; there are sad people who only want to suffer in life; you flagellate yourself from time to time; and, above all, you have to fast a lot », he says.
However, a curiosity awoke inside him: he wanted to see for himself everything he thought about the life of a seminarian.
The surprise when meeting the famous seminarian
After a few months, he participated in his first camp in the Dolomites, and it was then that he personally met the famous seminarian that he had talked so much about with his friend. Such was the impression he made on him that he promised to go see him at the seminary in Rome.
«How important it is to meet cheerful, happy and convinced seminarians. All my misconceptions about the seminar vanished. Instead of sad old men who didn’t know what to do with their lives, I found about twenty happy young people who had fun and loved each other fraternally. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much as when I was at the seminar those days,» says the young Italian.
A relationship with Jesus that I longed for
Something that really impressed him and marked him was observing the relationship that those boys, so young, had with Jesus: «It was a relationship that I also longed for. «I was able to experience that there was a true dialogue between their hearts and Christ.»
Seeing the respect of these boys towards the Blessed Sacrament caught his attention deeply. Furthermore, his prayer and meditation on his knees was like a knock, because, for a young man from Riccione, this attitude of reverence was classified as that of fanatic people. And in these seminarians he did not observe fanaticism, but love for Christ.
«God’s plan for me»
«I left this first experience with two great graces that marked my first real conversion: the first that being a young Christian means being happy and not being a sad, intolerant. The second is that I saw that God had a very beautiful plan for me, so from that moment on the desire to know what that plan God had in mind for me was born in me.
And with all these vibrations inside him, he began the Institute, a somewhat difficult stage because living the faith in that environment was complicated: «I suffered harassment for being a Christian.» This situation, and the love of God that he experienced in his days in the seminary, pushed him to attend Mass every day and to insistently ask Jesus every day what he wanted him to do with his life.
«While, on the one hand, I asked God in prayer, on the other I was very afraid that He would call me to be a priest. The experience in Rome was certainly beautiful, but he did not at all want to be one of those who would one day have to move to the seminary. I, as another teenager from Riccione, had the desire to start a family with many children, and I thought that entering the seminary was the greatest sacrifice in the world.»
Daily Mass, Frequent Confession, and Total Panic
His five years of high school were spent between the normal life of any teenager and some practices of piety: daily Mass, frequent confession and “total panic” that the Lord would call him to the priesthood.
«The last month of my senior year was the most difficult, precisely because the time was approaching when I would have to make a decision for my life. The State exam was just a few weeks away, so, as I had always done in previous years, I went to the seminary for four days to pray for the exams and try to figure out what to do with my life».
A nun from the community
He was in this state of uncertainty when, sitting at the table with a nun from him community, he began to tell him everything that was going through his heart. «Why don’t you go to Ireland with one of our priests and do a year’s experience in the Holy Family Mission?» the nun told him.
Considering him poor command of the language, he immediately rejected him proposal, but on the way home he thought that it was really the Holy Spirit who was guiding him through this nun.
As he used to do, he put everything in prayer, asking the Lord to open the way to know his will: either the university or Ireland. While he debated between these two alternatives, that summer he began working as a lifeguard at one of the largest water parks in Italy, located in Riccione.
Medjugorje
Finally, he decided to go to the Irish Mission, but the uncertainty did not leave him alone. «We were coming to the end of my stay in Ireland and in the chapel, after Mass, I got on my knees and openly told the Lord: «Listen, if you want me to be a priest that’s fine, but you have to give me the love for the vocation because now I don’t have it.»»
The answer did not take long to arrive. Returning from the Medjugorje pilgrimage, from the youth festival, where he entrusted everything to the Virgin, he became ill, with a fever that lasted a week.
Convalescent, he remembered the words that a priest had told him: «Take it easy because, when the grace comes to understand what God wants from you, it will be so clear to you that you will even remember the position you were in and the smell of the air.»
The power of the priest in forgiving sins
«One of those mornings, when I was sick, I was lying in bed and in a moment I seemed to experience the joy and love of Heaven in my heart,» says Giacomo.
«At a certain moment the clarity came to me internally of how great and beautiful the vocation of the priest is: a simple man chosen by God receives the power to forgive and absolve a person’s sins; not even the angels and the Virgin, despite the happiness they experience, can absolve; the priest does. During that moment of grace, I no longer had any reason to say no to the call, and I said my first and true Yes. From that moment of great grace until my entry into the seminary, not much time passed, just a couple of months».
Thus, on October 6, 2019, he entered the Work of Jesus High Priest community and, after having completed the first two years of propaedeutic studies, he began the course of studies at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.«What I have ahead of me are still several years of study, but with only one desire: to do only the will of God.“(…) laddove è abbondato il peccato, ha sovrabbondato la grazia (Romans 5:20-21)” (where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more)».
He is very grateful to all the benefactors of the CARF Foundation who make his studies in Rome possible: «I keep in my prayers all the friends of the CARF Foundation who make my stay in Rome possible. Thank you very much for your generosity».
