Rome – A Catholic priest executed by the Nazis in 1944 who’s today a candidate for sainthood will be memorialized in November, along with four other figures, in a “Garden of the Righteous of the World” located on the island of Sicily.
Father Alcide Lazzeri will be honored in a ceremony on Nov. 29, which will feature the installation of a star bearing his name in the garden, which was launched in 2015 as a joint project of a cultural institute based in Agrigento, Sicily, and local park authorities.
The idea of the garden is to honor moral heroes of humanity, and, given the location in Sicily, it’s no surprise that anti-mafia campaigners figure prominently on the honor roll. Among the first honorees was Father Giuseppe “Pino” Puglisi, gunned down in 1993 for his success in persuading youth in his Brancaccio neighborhood of Palermo to reject organized crime.
Puglisi was beatified by Pope Francis in 2013, becoming the first figure to be officially recognized as a martyr to the mafia.
Among others memorialized in the garden are Khaled al-Assad, a Syrian archeologist beheaded by ISIS in 2015 for hiding historical artifacts so they couldn’t be destroyed; Alganesh Fessaha, an Eritrean human rights activist known for her protection of migrants both in African and on the Italian island of Lampedusa; and Jakob and Elizabeth Künzler, a Swiss couple who aided countless sick and injured persons during the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917.
Now Lazzeri will join the list, honored not only for his death at the hands of German troops but also for attempting to save the lives of his flock.
It was June 29, 1944, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, when the “Hermann Göring” division of the Germany Luftwaffe, then in retreat from the Allied campaign in Italy, arrived in the small town of Civitella in Val di Chiana, located in the northcentral region of Tuscany. Lazzeri was saying Mass for the community when troops stormed into the church and ordered everyone out.
According to witnesses, Lazzeri told the soldiers, “Kill me and let me people go free.”
Unfortunately, it was not to be. The troops did indeed execute Lazzeri, but they also proceeded to kill 243 other people in and around Civitella, representing one of the worst atrocities of the Second World War in Italy. The massacre was carried out in reprisal for an earlier raid by Italian partisans that left three German soldiers dead.
A beatification cause was opened in 2018 by the Diocese of Arezzo-Cortona-Sansepolcro on the 75th anniversary of the priest’s death.
“Still today, his fame as a martyr is very much alive,” said Archbishop Riccardo Fontana upon signing the decree. “This this choice, our church wants to hand on to future generations the message that the faith knows how to resist evil.”
Born in 1887 in Chitignano, another small town in Tuscany, Lazzeri entered the Franciscan order at a young age was ordained at 23. He was a chaplain to young Italian soldiers during the First World War. He later opted to leave the Franciscans and became a diocesan priest, ending up in Civitella.
Fontana noted that Lazzeri had shown pastoral concern for all parties during the conflict, even conducting a funeral ceremony for the three slain German soldiers.
After killing Lazzeri, the German forces proceeded to burn much of Civitella to the ground while murdering scores of residents. To this day, the diocese still conserves Eucharistic hosts trampled by the German troops during the massacre, as well as shreds from the vestments Lazzeri was wearing at the time he was shot.
One eyewitness to Lazzeri’s death was an altar boy serving his Mass that day, a 10-year-old boy from Civitella named Luciano Giovannetti, who would go on to become a priest and, eventually, the bishop of Fiesole, always saying that he owed his vocation to Lazzeri. Giovannetti died this past June 29, marking the eightieth anniversary of the massacre.
To be inducted during a Nov. 29 ceremony into the “pantheon of good” along with Lazzeri are the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, known as the “martyr of the poor”; Mohammed V of Morocco, the country’s last sultan who supported decolonization and also protected Morocco’s Jewish population; Giorgio la Pira, a longtime mayor of Florence and a principal architect of Italy’s post-war democratic constitution; and Salvo D’Acquisto, a member of the Italian carabinieri who gave his life to save 22 civilians during WWII, who is also the subject of a beatification cause.
