A Catholic priest executed by the Nazis in 1944 who’s today a candidate for sainthood will be memorialised in November, along with four other figures, in a “Garden of the Righteous of the World” located on the island of Sicily.
Fr Alcide Lazzeri will be honoured in a ceremony on November 29, which will feature the installation of a star bearing his name in the garden, which was launched in 2015 as a joint project of a cultural institute based in Agrigento, Sicily, and local park authorities.
The idea of the garden is to honour moral heroes of humanity, and, given the location in Sicily, it’s no surprise that anti-mafia campaigners figure prominently on the honour roll. Among the first honourees was Fr Giuseppe “Pino” Puglisi, gunned down in 1993 for his success in persuading youth in his Brancaccio neighbourhood of Palermo to reject organised crime.
Fr Puglisi was beatified by Pope Francis in 2013, becoming the first figure to be officially recognised as a martyr to the mafia.
Among others memorialised in the garden are Khaled al-Assad, a Syrian archeologist beheaded by ISIS in 2015 for hiding historical artifacts so they couldn’t be destroyed; Alganesh Fessaha, an Eritrean human rights activist known for her protection of migrants both in African and on the Italian island of Lampedusa; and Jakob and Elizabeth Künzler, a Swiss couple who aided countless sick and injured persons during the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917.
Now Fr Lazzeri will join the list, honoured not only for his death at the hands of German troops but also for attempting to save the lives of his flock.
It was June 29, 1944, the feast of Sts Peter and Paul, when the “Hermann Göring” division of the Germany Luftwaffe, then in retreat from the Allied campaign in Italy, arrived in the small town of Civitella in Val di Chiana, located in the northcentral region of Tuscany. Fr Lazzeri was saying Mass for the community when troops stormed into the church and ordered everyone out.
According to witnesses, Fr Lazzeri told the soldiers, “Kill me and let me people go free”.
Unfortunately, it was not to be. The troops did indeed execute Lazzeri, but they also proceeded to kill 243 other people in and around Civitella, representing one of the worst atrocities of the Second World War in Italy. The massacre was carried out in reprisal for an earlier raid by Italian partisans that left three German soldiers dead.
A beatification cause was opened in 2018 by the Diocese of Arezzo-Cortona-Sansepolcro on the 75th anniversary of the priest’s death.