(OSV News) – The feast day for St. Pier Giorgio Frassati on July 4 will be his first ever since his canonization last year. This means a novena long prayed to him as a blessed is now being prayed to him as a saint.
"The novena in honor of Pier Giorgio Frassati has been around for a long time. I believe the imprimatur (bishop's seal of approval) is dated 1994 – four years after (his) beatification. Leading up to the canonization ... Frassati USA has always encouraged participation in the novena twice a year, for his April 6 birthday and his July 4 feast day," Christine Wohar, Frassati USA executive director, explained in an email to OSV News.
"This year is the first ever novena to SAINT Pier Giorgio Frassati," she wrote in the email. It started June 25.
To commemorate this, the Nashville, Tennessee-based website of Frassati USA, the organization that was created to promote then-Blessed Frassati's cause for canonization, has posted a new video novena produced by a Long Island-based Frassati young adult group.
St. Pier Giorgio, sometimes simply called "Giorgio," the patron saint of young adults, has drawn thousands of devotees among young people throughout the world. He was a daily communicant who spent long hours in Eucharistic adoration and often went mountain climbing with friends while reciting the rosary. A lay Dominican in the last years of his life, his service to the poor was unknown to his wealthy family who only learned of it during his funeral. Vast numbers of impoverished people paid their respects to the 24-year-old whose short life was taken by a sudden onset of polio on July 4, 1925.
Drawn to St. Pier Giorgio's deep devotion to the Eucharist, service to the poor and a love of sports and the outdoors, numerous young adult groups have made him their patron and modeled their activities on his life.
Fr. Charles Mangano said for the saint's first feast day Wohar, his "friend for many, many years," tapped his Frassati group to create "a whole new video of the novena and litany, and do something contemporary."
He said members of Frassati Long Island at Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in West Islip, New York, rose to the challenge and volunteered their time. Over nine months, the group shot in various locations and weather, scenes inside and outside several churches.
"Everything was edited beautifully," the associate pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes told OSV News. "It looked gorgeous, and all of a sudden the hard drive crashed."
This was in early June, a day before the first deadline to submit the rough cut to Wohar, explained Chris de Leon, one of the project leads on the video.
"It just stopped reading on my laptop," he told OSV News. "And it was just kind of crazy how, like at that moment, before it crashed, I was like, 'OK, we're almost done. We're almost at the finish line.' And then the worst possible thing that could happen happened, at the worst possible time."
De Leon, 32, said he prayed for St. Pier Giorgio's intercession "the entire time, when I was editing it. And especially, the day it crashed, I was asking for Giorgio's intercession." He said he also asked for St. John Bosco's intercession because he is the patron saint of editors and for St. Carlo Acutis' because "he's the big technology guy." St. Carlo, the first millennial saint, who was canonized on the same day as St. Pier Giorgio, Sept. 7, 2025, coded and created his own website dedicated to tracking Eucharistic miracles around the world at the age of 11.
De Leon and another young adult heavily involved in the production made a hard scramble to get the drive fixed and had to mail it to the headquarters of a hard drive recovery company, which said it would take some time.
He was ready to just scrap it all, he said, when on June 24, the day before the novena started, the hard drive was mailed back. The company was able to recover 90% of the files, but the file of the fully-edited product remained corrupted.
Still, he said, he was hesitant to re-edit. But Wohar asked whether there was anything salvageable from the recovered material and so de Leon and the team pressed on.
In the meantime, de Leon said, Fr. Mangano prayed deliverance prayers over his computer. The team was able to make some new cuts with the recovered data and created Day 1 of the novena, but he still did not think there was enough to post the remaining days.
Even while the novena was running, de Leon, a self-described passionate videographer, said there had been some tweaking of the videos before each day of the novena.
"As a perfectionist, I had to let go. 'OK, Chris, this is not your project. This is God's project.' So it was a true test of grace. And I learned that especially up until, and after, the hard drive crashed out," said the account manager at a retail merchandising and marketing company.
But de Leon and Fr. Mangano said Wohar reassured them that Frassati USA has been receiving messages from the faithful all over the world who have described being moved and deeply touched while praying along with the videos.
Some videos have had as many as 1,200 praying and others in the several hundreds.
Fr. Mangano called it a "very rough draft," but said still, "people are weeping while praying with it. It's just so beautiful and my young adult group did just an incredible job with it."
"That's a very big consolation to this, all these struggles, because I was thinking, 'Why do I have to do this, can you (God) send someone else," said de Leon, who was inspired to return to his Catholic roots after seeing his father enter and then complete formation for the diaconate three years later, in 2021.
"But I remember thinking, like, that's exactly what Moses said, you know ... God uses flawed people and even flawed products, like the novena now – the first iteration of the novena – that he used flawed people to bring his sheep back. And that's what I feel like is happening with these novenas (videos) that are published," said de Leon.
De Leon said when he along with 12 other young adults were asked by Fr. Mangano three years ago to spearhead the Frassati group at Our Lady of Lourdes, he did not know who St. Pier Giorgio was. But he was especially attracted to his title of "friend of the friendless." Being significantly more devout than his other friends who are Catholics that are not so active in Church, de Leon said he has felt compelled to "hold a torch" to draw other young people into God's love.
