The Gold Standard of the Laity of St Dominic: St Pier Giorgio Frassati and St Bartolomeo Longo

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On the left: St Pier Giorgio Frassati. On the right: St Bartolomeo Longo

In the first few months of Pope Leo XIV's pontificate, the Dominican Order received two new saints into its ranks: St Pier Giorgio Frassati and St Bartolomeo Longo. What is extraordinary about this is the fact that through Frassati and Longo, the Dominican Order has bequeathed the Church two saints who come neither from the priestly branch of the Order nor from the religious branch, but rather from the branch of the Dominican Laity.

Longo and Frassati lived through the turbulent times of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and despite the historical and contextual differences, both managed in their own way to converge in a work steeped in the spirit of Saint Dominic. To us today, both appear as saints somewhat distant in time, having lived in the last century and in a foreign land. However, the topicality of their spirit, in the most mysterious of ways, resonates deeply with the trends of our own times. In this brief article, I would like to share some thoughts with you, precisely with these two points in mind: first, I would like to explore how the life and work of Bartolomeo Longo and Pier Giorgio Frassati, each in their own way, germinated into a concrete expression of the spirit of Saint Dominic, and second, by jointly exploring the significance of their canonisation for our present age.

1.     The Spirit of St Dominic

St Thomas Aquinas famously captured the spirituality of our Order pithily by the phrase: contemplata aliis tradere.[1] The Dominican is one who hands on the fruits of his contemplation to others. When Saint Thomas wrote this phrase, he was in the midst of a controversy, that is, he was defending the new form of religious life, established by Saint Dominic, against the criticism of older and more prestigious religious orders of the time. Before Dominic, religious life was strictly contemplative in nature. Consecrated persons with a religious profession, such as the Benedictines, Carthusians, and Trappists, lived in monasteries, dedicating their lives entirely to contemplation and the praise of God.

Dominic did not discard this form of life but opened it up and combined it with another form of life: the active life. As we know, St Dominic founded a way of life that cherished an apostolic mission at its heart, one that involved a certain level of activity: preaching. He did not want his friars to spend their lives in the choir or in libraries, in contemplation, but rather wanted them to share the fruits of their contemplation by going out to preach. Those coming from the ancient orders began to criticise this way of life, arguing that there is no life more perfect than one spent entirely in contemplation.

St Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican who, in his youth, had experienced the monastic life at Monte Cassino, sought to defend the form of life of his Order. He argued that the difference between one order and another lies on account of its goal. Some orders have a contemplative goal, while others have a completely active one, such as those dedicated to works of mercy. It is this goal that precisely distinguishes one order as more perfect than another. Yet, among those religious orders whose goal is contemplation, no order may be called higher than the other on account of their goal, for they all share a common end. The principle of distinction in pre-eminence amongst these orders then rests on the kind of activity they perform. In this sense, religious orders whose activity is to share the fruits of one's contemplation (contemplata aliis tradere) are more perfect than other religious orders whose goal ends with the activity of pure contemplation.

Behind the reasoning of the Angelic Doctor, there lies the principle of the twofold relation that obtains between an agent and a goal: (1) if an end is yet unpossessed, a person acts in order to acquire it; (2) if, however, the end is possessed, a person acts in order to diffuse it to others. The conclusion that follows then is simple: the activity of sharing the fruits of one's contemplation presumes the possession of the fullness of contemplation. By this, St Thomas not only elevated, but also programmed the life of the Friars Preachers. The preacher must have the fullness of contemplation if he is to lead a life of sharing its fruits with others.

Later, we realise that the basis of St Thomas’ argument is Christological. In the Tertia pars of the Summa Theologiae, St Thomas tells us that Christ himself chose this form of life:

The contemplative life is, absolutely speaking, more perfect than the active life, because the latter is taken up with bodily actions: yet that form of active life in which a man, by preaching and teaching, delivers to others the fruits of his contemplation, is more perfect than the life that stops at contemplation, because such a life is built on an abundance of contemplation, and consequently such was the life chosen by Christ.[2]

Christ, according to Saint Thomas, is the preacher par excellence, he is the first model of the Dominican preacher because he was the first to choose a life in which he shared the fullness of his contemplation with others.

The Dominican life, as pithily proposed by St Thomas, was wondrously realised in the lives of the two Lay Dominicans, recently canonised by Pope Leo XIV: St Pier Giorgio Frassati and St Bartolo Longo. Their lives are indeed marked by an apostolate among the poor and the suffering. However, for both men this apostolate was never an end in itself nor a starting point as such. Their active endeavours in favour of the least privileged overflowed from a life of spiritual intimacy with God - the First Truth - bred out of a life of contemplation.

Their active endeavours in favour of the least privileged overflowed from a life of spiritual intimacy with God - the First Truth - bred out of a life of contemplation.

The life of St Bartolo Longo, the converted Satanist solicitor, is remembered for, on the one hand, the apostolate of the Rosary - which St John Paul II called 'the contemplation of the face of Christ with Mary' [3] - and, on the other hand, for the works of mercy he founded, such as the orphanage for girls established in 1887, the school and technical institute for the sons of prisoners founded in 1892 and for their daughters in 1922. This is not to mention the numerous shelters for the poor and homeless that he established with his wife, Countess Mariana di Fusco. In fact, it is safe to say that the city of Pompei became an architectonic expression of this Dominican symbiosis of the contemplative life on one side and the active life on the other. The magnificent Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Rosary of Pompei, which dominates the horizon of the historic city, is surrounded by the buildings where these works of mercy were and are still carried out to this very day.

It is safe to say that the city of Pompei became an architectonic expression of this symbiosis of the contemplative life on one side and the active life on the other.

This very same synergy, between the contemplative and active life, is no less seen in the life of the young man, St Pier Giorgio Frassati. Frassati came from a well-to-do family in the Piemontese city of Turin. His agnostic father was the founder of the liberal newspaper La Stampa and later a senator, while his mother did not harbour any strong religious convictions either. Nevertheless, Pier Giorgio was a young man who spent long periods in prayer in his room, praying the Rosary several times a day, sought daily Communion and Eucharistic Adoration, prayed the Little Office of Our Lady, and was a member of various groups promoting a well structured daily routine of prayers. So much so, that his own sister, Luciana Frassati Gawronska, wrote how his mother often worried that her son would become a priest or that he was losing too much time in prayer. She would seek out his catechists or priests close to him and ask them not to continue encouraging him to prayer. It was from this contemplative source that Frassati began to cultivate an increasingly active and youthful fervent spirit on behalf of the poor and the workers.

In this sense, Frassati was an extraordinary man. His sensibility for the poor, the sick and the most neglected in society, as well as his zeal to champion the workers' cause, was not stirred by the political-revolutionary climate of his time but was inspired instead by the movement of the Church’s social doctrine driven by Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum of 1891. So much so that in his political conflicts, he even boldly took a stand against his father’s liberal position. Pier Giorgio, the son of the prominent founder of La Stampa newspaper and the liberal senator, did not hesitate to become a prominent activist for Catholic Action and to champion the workers' cause against the exploitation of other social and political movements and ideologies that were leading to authoritarian regimes, such as Mussolini's Fascism.

Frassati's quick death is itself a witness to this spirit. In fact, Pier Giorgio died after a short but severe illness caused by poliomyelitis, which he likely contracted from his work with the sick and the poor.

2.     The Spirit of Longo and Frassati Today

Yet, what is Longo and Frassati's lasting inspiration for our own times? There are many ways to answer this question. For our present purposes, I am only interested in what these two Dominican Tertiaries can say to us, as members of the Dominican Family. It seems to me that the most providential factor in the canonisation of these two lay members of our Order, is the fact that they provide a sound model for the much need witness that the Dominican laity can offer to the Church in our time. As a partaker in the Order's preaching mission, the Lay Dominican is called to mould his or her life on the model of Christ the preacher, developing a symbiotic form of life that welds contemplation and active work for the sake of promoting the full development of the human person and his community. Like Christ, the life of a Lay Dominican must unfold as a continuous and assiduous contemplation of the truth leading to an equally consistent and assiduous commitment to the proclamation of that truth: sharing the fruit of one's contemplation of the truth.

Frassati, by his life, testified that genuine progress for human development is not achieved through an ideologically driven revolution but through a life of virtue lived in the light of the beatitudes.

The Second Vatican Council offered a renewed reflection on the role of the laity in the Church. Among other things, it noted that the context in which the laity lives out its life contrasts with that of priests and religious. While the specific context of ministers in Holy Orders and religious life is the sacred ministry, the context of the laity is precisely the secular world (saeculum). In Lumen Gentium, the Council states,

[T]he laity, by their very vocation, seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God. They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life, from which the very web of their existence is woven. They are called there by God that by exercising their proper function and led by the spirit of the Gospel they may work for the sanctification of the world from within as a leaven.[4]

Bartolo Longo was inspired to carry out his work for the apostolate of the Rosary precisely because the people of Pompei had fallen into a form of religious superstition. Pier Giorgio, on the other hand, was seeing that workers were being swept away by a spirit of revolution that was preparing fertile ground for authoritarian governments. Bartolo Longo responded to the challenge of his context with the prayer of the Rosary, that school of Mary which places before the Christian, for contemplation, the deepest mysteries of our faith. Frassati, on the other hand, responded fearlessly and with great courage to the challenge he faced by 'proclaiming by his example that a life lived in the spirit of Christ, the spirit of the beatitudes, is a happy one.'[5] It is no wonder that when he joined the Dominican Third Order, he took the name of the Florentine Renaissance prophet, Girolamo Savonarola. Frassati, by his life, testified that genuine progress for human development is not achieved through an ideologically driven revolution but through a life of virtue lived in the light of the beatitudes. As the theologian Karl Rahner, who was also a close friend of Frassati, wrote about him,

His uniqueness [Pier Giorgio's] consists in the fact that the spirit of rebellion was not in him. Frassati is a Christian, simply and absolutely spontaneously... he had the strength and ability to be what he was, not because of the opposition of his parents' generation, nor from any prognosis and diagnosis of the culture of his time... but from the Christian reality itself: namely, that God exists, that what sustains us is prayer, that the Eucharist nourishes what is eternal in us, that all peoples are brothers.[6]

Being attuned, to the truth, which is God himself, by dint of contemplation, Longo and Frassati could prophetically read the signs of their times. They could rightly understand the condition of humanity and society at the beginning of the 20th century and were not afraid to challenge familial, political, and social conventions of their time. They went to the peripheries and, as St Dominic himself did, they were not afraid to make free choices through which they brought about great changes. As the great Dominican theologian Yves Congar once wrote, 'That slight mixture of truth and freedom ... is one of the graces of the Dominican Order.'[7]

** This article was delivered as a speech by Fr. Alan Joseph Adami OP at the Basilica of Jesus of Nazareth, Tas-Sliema, on November 7th, 2025, as part of a celebration for the Maltese Dominican Family marking the feast of all Dominican Saints.

[1] ST IIa IIae q. 188, a. 6.

[2] Cf. ST III, q. 40, a. 1, ad 2.

[3] Cf. John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae (2002).

[4] Lumen Gentium, 31.

[5] John Paul II, Homily, May 1990.

[6] Karl Rahner, ‘Introduction’ in Luciana Frassati, A man of the beatitudes: Pier Giorgio Frassati, 2nd ed. (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1992).

[7] Yves Congar, 'The Order of Preachers in Today’s World,' Dominican Ashram 3, no. 2 (June 1984): 52.