A couple days ago, in Santhià, I was visiting the Chiesa di Sant’Agata in the center. It’s a lovely neoclassical structure, more hulking than graceful, but it’s not entirely devoid of the latter. An older man stood outside as I entered, and he followed me in soon after. He tailed me for a bit, but then drifted off. A fellow tourist? A suspicious local? A plain-clothed priest? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t pay it much heed, instead descending to visit the Romanesque crypt devoted to Santo Stefano. When I resurfaced, though, he waited at the top of the steps. “Tutto posto?”, he asked. Everything ok? Yep, I replied, and carried on with my tour. Near the back, a chapel caught my attention, because of the stunning altarpiece on display.
For once, it turns out my artistic instincts were on target. This, art historians suspect, was the original main altarpiece in the previous church on this footprint, and it’s much valued. It’s a polyptych by Gerolamo Giovenone, featuring ten different figures in two rows of five, though one no longer exists. The only problem, though, was that the chapel was quite dark. My mysterious shadow emerged right at that moment, though, to whisk me forward, activating the motion-detector lights that revealed the scene in full. After affording me a generous opportunity to take in the scene, he directed my attention to a small stack of prayercards on the right, and the picture of a young man. His name, I learned, was Secondo Pollo, and he was a Sacerdote Vercellese, or a priest of Vercelli. He lived from 1908 to 1941. The old man placed one of the prayercards in my hands and then left.
One’s mind leaps to certain conclusions when seeing an Italian’s life ending in 1941, and those conclusions were accurate enough in the case of Pollo. After spending five years teaching in a seminary in Vercelli, he was recruited by the Military Curia in Rome to serve as a chaplain in the Alpine corps. Despite being physically weak, he quickly earned the respect of his men. Then, on December 26, 1941, serving in Montenegro, he was shot in the leg. The bullet severed the femoral artery and he bled to death, but even in those final moments, his attention was drawn to serving those around him. His remains are interred at the Cathedral of Sant’Eusebio in Vercelli.
In 1998, Pope John Paul II elevated him to the level of “Blessed,” the second rung on the ladder of sainthood, for leaving “the military chaplains of the whole world an example of how to love and serve one’s brothers under arms, and to the Alpine troops a model and a protector from heaven.” This is a great honor, even if auto-translate reduces Beato Secondo Pollo to Blessed Second Chicken.
I stumbled across that prayercard as I departed Robbio this morning, so Pollo was on my mind as I squelched and splashed my way through flooded irrigation access roads. If I wasn’t enjoying that, a small pack of river otters sure was. They weren’t alone. All around me were small packs of African Sacred Ibis birds, their long, black beaks shaped like scythes taking quick meals from the watery terrain.
And really, the walking wasn’t so bad–it was better, certainly, than yesterday’s ordeal. I paused briefly in Nicorvo on a bench outside the bar to inhale some couscous and then pushed ahead along a blessedly straight dirt track that ran parallel to the highway. While my eyes were on Mortara, the biggest town in this section, I was surprised to encounter a smaller settlement just before it, Madonna del Campo. As the name might suggest, the community was organized around a small shrine. And this is the other reason that Pollo was on my mind. Within, I encountered another young “Blessed,” Beato Teresio Olivelli, who grew up in Mortara. Born in 1916, he died in 1945.
After graduating from law school in 1938, Olivelli was loosely aligned with the Mussolini regime, even serving as the secretary of the Institute of Fascist Culture. In that role, he made two trips to Hitler’s Germany, which soured him on Nazism. While he enjoyed postponement from the widely mandated military service among Italian men in World War II, he waived that privilege, declaring that, “I have no heroic fury. I only wish to merge with the masses, in solidarity with the people who, without having decided to do so, fight and suffer.”
He earned a prestigious post as rector of a college in Pavia upon his return, but the Nazi-Fascist alliance had become a source of great concern. After refusing to collaborate, he was arrested in 1943, though he managed to escape while in the process of deportation to Austria. He joined resistance efforts, first in Brescia and then in Milan. Unfortunately, the state police caught up with him once more in Milan, and he was shipped off to a series of concentration camps: Fossoli, Bolzano, Flossenbürg, and Hersbruck. Even as he tended to the needs of his fellow prisoners, he placed an ever greater target on his back, and at Hersbruck in particular he was beaten by SS officers. He persisted, tending to the ill, performing death rites, and shared his all-too-limited food with the feeblest. By late December 1944, Olivelli was little more than a mass of bruises and sores. He made one last attempt to help a fellow inmate on New Year’s Eve, trying to intervene as a young man was beaten, only to receive a powerful kick to the midsection in return. That would be the deathblow, he just didn’t know it yet.
Olivelli’s elevation to the “Blessed” rank was a much slower process, including a 23-year lull between the initial submission of materials in 1992 and the affirmation by Pope Francis in 2015. Even still, though, his beatification wouldn’t occur for another three years, until 2018. If the line between “positive role model” and “miracle-wielding saint” seems a bit muddy to you in all of this, I’m right there with you, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt for us to find more ways to celebrate the former.
Unlike Olivelli’s beatification campaign, my day sped along at a genuinely merry clip. I paused in Mortara to grab a cappuccino and capitalize on some free wifi. As I took care of some business, two older pilgrims, a man and a woman entered. The woman asked if the bar had a stamp. It didn’t; they left. Two minutes later, they returned, and she asked if the bartender might fill their hydration bladders with cold water. The bartender was willing. Right at that moment, the man’s bladder (the one in his backpack) erupted like a geyser, covering the bar floor in water. I kissed my bottle and slipped out the door.
The remaining walk was kindly divided into small chunks–an hour of rice to Remondo, an hour of corn to Tromello, and one more hour of corn to my final destination, Garlasco. In Remondo, a little like Olivelli, I had my own brush with the law. Strolling through town, I felt a car coming up slowly behind me. Suddenly, the caribinieri were at my side, the window on the dark blue car rolled down and revealing an officer with a perfectly shaved head and impenetrable sunglasses. “Buongiorno,” I offered, amicably enough. He stared at me for two seconds. And then, without his face moving, he managed to ask, “Where are you from?” I decided to win him over. “I’m from America,” I replied, “and I am a pilgrim walking in the Jubilee!” “Where do you go?” “To Roma!” He stared at me, straight-faced, for another two seconds, and then he offered a fractional head nod, flashed a thumbs up, and delivered a deadpan “Buon Viaggio.” I was free.
Not only was I free, I was reborn. I glided into Garlasco at 1:30. Even better, my host had already sent me a code for the lockbox, so by 1:32 I was already settled into the hostel. Best of all, the place had a washer and a dryer! (And also, holiest of holies, wifi that is accessible from my bed!!!) Just 22 hours removed from the low point of the walk so far, I had soared to one of the highest. Sometimes, you just have to go a little further to make the lights come on.
