On that day, dear readers, we will be commemorating a truly remarkable man, a friar about whom some of our older brothers still retain personal memories, Fr. Placido Cortese, who was born exactly 100 years ago on March 7, 1907. Fr. Placido was the General Director of the Messenger of Saint Anthony from 1937 to 1944, the year in which he was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the headquarters of the S.S. in Trieste.
Fr. Palcido was a small man, but his moral life was grand and sublime. In the tragic days before the end of the Second World War his heroic works of charity were similar to those of people like Oscar Schindler, Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Giorgio Perlasca. His confessional at the Basilica of Saint Anthony here in Padua became a safe haven for those who volunteered to pass on and exchange information to organise escape routes for those in danger of being deported to the Nazi death camps. That confessional became a focal point for those charitable souls who were willing to put their own lives at risk to save innumerable men, women and children.
Fr. Palcido’s original dream had been that of living the Franciscan life at the service of Saint Anthony’s devotees and the readers of our magazine, but when historical events and Christian faith called him to make difficult and dangerous choices, Fr. Placido had neither fears nor doubts. He took upon himself the desperate suffering and plight of hundreds of individuals in open defiance of the terrible consequences he would be facing if found out.
On October 8, 1944, Fr. Placido was betrayed by an informer. The Nazi’s took him to the bunker at Piazza Oberdan in Trieste, where he was savagely tortured to extract information from him. But Fr Palcido, who was then 37, chose death rather than betray his collaborators. His body was then incinerated in the crematory ovens at the Risiera di San Sabba, the only death camp on Italian soil.
That small, fragile friar had offered superhuman resistance in the face of the cruellest, relentless torture. He was able to remain silent to save his fellow friars and collaborators. Even his prayer was silent, with clasped hands locked by delicate fingers that had been broken by his torturers.
One of the last people to see him alive was British Cadet, Ernest Charles Roland Barker from Gosport, Hants. Sgt. Barker had been captured by the Germans in the Carnia area of northern Italy, and sent to be interrogated at the bunker of Piazza Oberdan. His affidavit, deposited on November 13, 1945, at the Military Department, Office of the Judge Advocate General in London, was recently discovered by Ivo Jevnikar, a Slovene journalist. The document describes Sgt. Barker’s encounter with the friar:
“I myself saw many prisoners [in the bunker], Croats, Italians, and other nationalities who had been ill treated, had their limbs broken and had received so-called ‘electrical treatment’ which had often resulted in burns and other injuries to the body. There was in particular an Italian priest, the parish priest of San Antonio Church [sic], Padua, whose nails had been extracted by force, whose arms had been broken, whose hair had been burned off and who bore the marks of repeated floggings on his body. I was afterwards told that he was shot.” In another part of the affidavit Barker states, “This man had helped British POWs…”
Fr. Placido’s choice was neither ideological nor in contrast to the Gospel. Rather was it a sign of contradiction in defiance to the horrors of Nazism.
It was not enough for him to recite the Hours with his fellow friars within the walls of the Basilica of Saint Anthony – his own life had become one long dialogue with Christ Crucified, which he saw on the faces of thousands of frightened refugees, and which inspired him to daring acts in their favour. During the conflict he would often repeat, “You cannot remain a spectator in war.”
On January 29, 2002, the Beatification process was initiated in the diocese of Trieste.
Updated on October 06 2016