With these words, Fr. Pierluigi Cameroni, Postulator General of the Causes of Saints of the Salesian Family, expressed his satisfaction for the canonization of Artemide Zatti, a professed layman of the Salesian Society of St. John Bosco (coadjutor brother), whose date was announced during the Consistory on August 27. The decree on the miracle had been promulgated last April: the August 2016 healing in the Philippines of a man suffering from an ischemic stroke with serious complications. Zatti is a new saint "close to the suffering," continued Fr. Cameroni, "and not only because he spent his life for them, but because he lived the experience of illness on himself, maturing an uncommon sensitivity toward the sick and never losing hope and joy."
Born Oct. 12, 1880, in Boretto (Reggio Emilia) he immediately experienced the hardships of poverty that forced his family, in 1897, to emigrate to Bahía Blanca, Argentina, where he began attending the parish led by the Salesians. Accepted as an aspirant by Monsignor Giovanni Cagliero, he entered the house in Bernal where he was given the task of caring for a young priest sick with tuberculosis. Zatti also contracted the disease and was therefore sent to the hospital of San Jose in Viedma where he was cared for by Father Evasio Garrone.
"Together with him, he asked and obtained from Mary Help of Christians," Fr. Cameroni explains, "the grace of healing with the promise, on his part, to dedicate his whole life to the care of the sick. He recovered and kept his promise. In 1911 he made perpetual profession. First he began to take charge of the pharmacy attached to the hospital. Later, he had total responsibility for the hospital, which became the gymnasium of his holiness: as a Good Samaritan he welcomed into the inn of his heart and into the San José Hospital in Viedma the poor, the sick, and those discarded by society. In each of them he visited Christ, healed Christ, fed Christ, clothed Christ, housed Christ, honored Christ." Stricken with cancer, he died on March 15, 1951, and John Paul II proclaimed him Blessed on April 14, 2002.
Celebrating the canonization were many countrymen from his hometown where his memory is alive, Argentines where his reputation for holiness quickly spread, as well as the entire Salesian Family and especially the coadjutors who have in Zatti their first saint. "The canonization of Blessed Artemide Zatti, a Salesian coadjutor," Fr. Cameroni concludes, "tells us the beauty of consecrated life and the value of a life entirely dedicated to God in service to the poor with the apostolic heart of Don Bosco. It is a strong impulse to promote the vocation of the Salesian coadjutor, who brings to all educational and pastoral fields the proper value of his layness, which makes him in a specific way a witness to the Kingdom of God in the world."
Source: Avvenire
