FRIAR PLACIDO CORTESE who helped to rescue Jews during the Holocaust was named Venerable in August (2021).
Like St. Maximilian Kolbe, Venerable Cortese was a Franciscan friar who directed a Catholic publication and was tortured and killed by the Nazis.
He is remembered for using his confessional in the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua to clandestinely communicate with an underground network that helped Jewish people and British prisoners of war escape the Nazi occupation of Italy. He is known locally as “the Italian Fr. Kolbe”.
He was born in 1907 on the island of Cres, which is now part of Croatia. At the age of 13, he entered the minor seminary with the Order of Friars Minor Conventual and took the name Placido after taking his vows in 1924.
He studied theology at the St. Bonaventure Theological College in Rome and was ordained a priest in 1930 at the age of 23. He offered his first Mass in the Basilica of St. Mary Major.
He spent several years serving at the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua, where he was asked to be the director of the Italian Catholic magazine Il Messaggero di Sant’Antonio (The Messenger of Saint Anthony), whose readership grew by 500,000 under his leadership.
After the German occupation of Padua, Friar Cortese was part of an underground group linked to the Resistance, using his printing press to make false documents to help Jewish people and Allied soldiers reach safety in Switzerland.
In October 1944, two German SS officers tricked the venerable into leaving the walls of his monastery in Padua, which was protected as an extraterritorial territory of the Holy See, on the false pretext of someone needing his help
He was immediately arrested and taken to a Gestapo bunker in Trieste, where he was brutally tortured, but he did not give away the names of any of his associates. After weeks of torture, he died in Gestapo custody in November 1944 at the age of 37. His confessional in the Basilica of St. Anthony of Padua continues to be a place of prayer today.
In one of his letters to his family, Venerable Placido wrote: “Religion is a burden that one never tires of carrying, but which more and more enamors the soul toward greater sacrifices, even to the point of giving one’s life for the defense of the faith and the Christian religion, even to the point of dying amid torments like the martyrs of Christianity in distant and foreign lands.”
In all the photos I could find of this new Venerable, he seems so joyous
