Good friends, a youth group in the parish, the prudent and calm advice of people that God placed at his side, and the joyful and dedicated life of other seminarians, were decisive for this young Italian to give his Yes to the Lord.
Today he is a seminarian in the community Work of Jesus High Priest and studies at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. But to get here he had to break down some barriers, I was a Christian, like thinking that the seminary was the closest thing to a prison, or even being harassed for being a Christian.
Giacomo enjoyed a happy childhood in Riccione, in the province of Rimini. Together with his parents and sister, he attended Mass on Sundays, more out of tradition than devotion and without ever really understanding its true meaning.
The big turning point in his life was at the age of 14, when he became part of the parish youth group, the Guardian Angels, a group desired by all the children attending catechesis.
"The youth group represented the opportunity to meet many other young people of the same age with whom to have healthy fun and share good experiences. So one of the big dreams at that age came true: I joined the youth group together with my best friends and got to know 70 or 80 other people. It was one of the largest youth groups in Riccione, to the point that at the camps we organized every year in the Dolomite Mountains there were always a hundred of us," he recalls with emotion.
Giacomo's passion was music, a hobby he shared with other boys in the group. One of them had a seminarian brother - now a priest - in the community. Work of Jesus High Priest.
"I remember that moment when he told me that his brother was a seminarian. We were running on the beach and it seemed to me that being a seminarian was something totally foreign to me. How is it possible that a young man decides to enter the seminary? For me it was a place that had nothing to envy to prison: You study all day long; there are sad people who only want to suffer in life; you flagellate yourself from time to time; and, above all, you have to fast a lot," he says.
However, a curiosity awakened within him: he wanted to see for himself everything he thought about the life of a seminarian.
After a few months, he took part in his first camp in the Dolomites, and it was then that he personally met the famous seminarian of whom he had spoken so much with his friend. He was so impressed that he promised to go to see him at the seminary in Rome.
"How important it is to meet joyful, happy and convinced seminarians. All my misconceptions about the seminary vanished. Instead of sad old men who didn't know what to do with their lives, I met about twenty cheerful young people who were having a good time and who loved each other fraternally.. I don't think I have ever laughed as much as when I was at the seminary in those days," says the young Italian.
Something that really impressed and marked him was to observe the relationship that those young boys had with Jesus: "It was a relationship that I also longed for. I was able to experience that there was a real dialogue between their hearts and Christ".
Seeing the respect of these boys for the Blessed Sacrament deeply struck him. Moreover, their prayer and meditation on their knees was like a wake-up call, because, for a young man from Riccione, this attitude of reverence was classified as that of fanatical people. And in these seminarians he did not observe fanaticism, but love for Christ.
"I came away from this first experience with two great graces that marked my first real conversion: the first one that to be a young Christian means to be happy and not to be a sad bigot. The second is that I saw that God had the most beautiful plan for me, so from that moment on, the desire was born in me to know what that plan was that God had in mind for me".
And with all these vibrations inside him, the Institute began, a somewhat difficult stage because living the faith in that environment was complicated: "I suffered harassment for being a Christian." This situation, and the love of God that he experienced in his seminary days, pushed him to attend Mass every day and to ask Jesus insistently every day what He wanted him to do with his life.
"While on the one hand I asked God in prayer, on the other hand I was very afraid that he would call me to be a priest. The experience in Rome was certainly beautiful, but I absolutely did not want to be one of those who would one day have to move to the seminary. I, like just another teenager in RiccioneI had the desire to start a family with many children, and I thought that entering the seminary was the greatest sacrifice in the world.
His five years of high school were spent between the normal life of any teenager and some pious practices: daily Mass, frequent confession and "total panic" that the Lord would call him to the priesthood.
"The last month of my senior year was the most difficult, precisely because the time was approaching when I would have to make a decision for my life. It was only a few weeks before the state exam, so, as I had always done in previous years, I went to the seminary for four days to pray for the exams and try to figure out what to do with my life."
He was in this state of uncertainty when, sitting at the table with a nun from his community, he began to tell her everything that was going through his heart. "Why don't you go to Ireland with one of our priests and do a one-year experience at Holy Family Mission?" the nun told him.
Considering his poor command of the language, he immediately rejected the proposal, but on the way home he thought that it was really the Holy Spirit who was guiding him through this nun.
As he was wont to do, he put everything into prayer, asking the Lord to open the way for him to know His will: either university or Ireland. While debating between these two alternatives, that summer he began working as a lifeguard at one of Italy's largest water parks located in Riccione.
Finally, he decided to go to the Irish Mission, but the uncertainty did not leave him alone: "We were coming to the end of my stay in Ireland and in the chapel, after Mass, I got down on my knees and openly told the Lord: "Listen, if you want me to be a priest that's fine, but you have to give me the love for the vocation because I don't have it now".
The answer was not long in coming. Returning from the pilgrimage of MedjugorjeAfter the youth festival, where he entrusted everything to Our Lady, he fell ill with a fever that lasted a week.
Convalescing, he recalled the words a priest had said to him: "Take it easy because, when the grace comes to understand what God wants from you, you will be so clear that you will even remember the position you were in and the smell of the air.
"One of those mornings, when I was sick, I was lying in bed and at one moment I seemed to experience the joy and love of Heaven in my heart," Giacomo recounts.
"At a certain moment, the clarity of how great and beautiful the vocation of the priest is was presented to me interiorly: a simple man chosen by God is given the power to forgive and absolve a person's sinsEven the angels and Our Lady, despite the joy they experience, cannot absolve; the priest can. During that moment of grace, I no longer had any reason to say no to the call and I said my first true Yes. From that moment of great grace until I entered the seminary, not much time passed, just a couple of months".
Thus, on October 6, 2019, he joined the community. Work of Jesus High Priest and, after completing the first two years of propaedeutic studies, he began his course of studies at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. "What I have ahead of me are still several years of study, but with only one desire: to do only the will of God. "(...) laddove è abbondato il peccato, ha sovrabbondato la grazia (Romans 5:20-21)" (where sin abounded, grace abounded much more)".
He is very grateful to all of the benefactors of the CARF Foundation who make his studies in Rome possible: "I keep in my prayers all the friends of the CARF Foundation who make my stay in Rome possible. Thank you very much for your generosity".
Gerardo Ferrara
BA in History and Political Science, specializing in the Middle East.
Head of the student body at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.
