The anguish of the family members soon turns into amazement. When the news of Pier Giorgio's death spreads through Turin, an incredible pilgrimage to his bedside begins. Young, old, men, women, wealthy, poor, visit their "friend". A row of unknown faces, of people who love that young man so good, so generous, from whom many times or even just once they have received a word, a smile, a help.
The crowd that attended his funeral on July 6 was immense. It was not attracted by his illustrious surname: many have only now discovered that Pier Giorgio is a Frassati. They know what they have seen or heard about him: his humility, his giving, the good he gave, his transparent faith.
On this day Pier Giorgio begins to reveal himself. Even those who were closest to him are only now realizing what they were unable to see clearly.
Little by little all the pieces of his life come to light, and we realize that they make up a mosaic of impressive Christian testimony.
Thanks to the commitment of friends and especially of Luciana Frassati, who dedicated herself to collecting testimonies about her brother and published volumes enriched by her precious personal memories, the figure of Pier Giorgio is increasingly defined over time with all its complexity and beauty.
Many young people take Pier Giorgio as a reference: his life is eloquent and full of suggestions for those who live the tension of witnessing to the world the love of Christ who died and rose again for men.
Frassati is a Christian, his objection consists only in being one in an absolutely spontaneous way, as if this were a spontaneous thing for everyone. He draws the strength and courage to be what he is not from opposition to his parents' generation, not from a diagnosis and a prognosis of the culture of the time, or from similar things, but from the Christian reality itself: that God exists, that what sustains us is prayer, that the sacrament nourishes the eternal in man, that all men are brothers. [...] Here one perceives in a mysterious way that the grace of God is not something deducible: here suddenly a Christian again, there where the environment induced one to think that such a thing belonged to the past. [...]
As far as we, who cannot act as judges, can know, here we are faced with a man who lived his Christianity with a naturalness that is almost frightening and with an unproblematic nature that is surprising and almost inviting (in reality he immersed his problems, perhaps by crying, in the grace of faith): praying, eating the bread of life and death, loving his neighbor.
Karl Rahner SJ, Introduction to Luciana Frassati, Pier Giorgio Frassati. The Days of His Life