This year marks the Centenary of the First World War, and the Pope visit two Military War Graves, one German, and one Italian, to grieve over that “futile massacre”, and in his homily during the Mass offered for them, he lamented the fact that it had not only failed to change peoples’ hearts, but another Second World War was shortly to break out again, while today we are witnessing what is essentially a Third Third War, being waged “piecemeal” in too many different lands, marked by ferocious crimes, massacres and destruction. Very significantly, the Pope’s prayer intention entrusted to the Apostleship of Prayer for October was to bring peace to the regions of the world most battered by war and violence. But, as the Pope said in his homily at the Military Sacrario at Redipuglia, this demands a change of heart and requires us to shake off the indifference of our hearts towards so many lives being lost by war. In the Gospel, Jesus tells us that only the people who care for their fellow brothers and sisters will be admitted to the joy of Lord, while those who show no such concern, and apathetically ask themselves “what has it got to with me?”, will be excluded.

We have been offered a wonderful example of the attitude that Christians should take up when faced with the immense suffering caused by war, in the life of St Richard Pampuri in this, the 25^th anniversary of his canonisation. John Paul II canonised him on November 1, 1989 in Saint Peter’s, and that same day his statue, carved in wood by the Filipino artist, Rinaldo Estonactoc, was enthroned in our Church in Manila (shown in the photograph). Our Saint was born in 1897 and died in 1930, a man of an acute sensitivity to the sufferings caused by war. Just two months before Italy entered the war, he disclosed his anguish in a letter addressed to one of his sisters, a missionary in Egypt, on March 13, 1915: “A tremendous threat is looming over Italy, which may become embroiled in the widespread conflict that has been bringing such havoc in the other countries of Europe over the past seven months. I pray that God will spare us that terrible scourge which will cause grief to every family, and drive many people to desolation and ruin”. At the time he was studying medicine at Pavia University, but was called up for military service and enlisted, and on April 1 1917, serving for a long time on the battle front. and it was from there that he wrote another letter to his sister on September 1 1917, while was working as a sergeant in the Medical Corps at Ruda, along the lower Isonzo River, in a hospital being used as a central depot supplying the small local hospitals scatted in the Carso valleys. In this letter, yet again, he voiced his anguish, “I have been working for two weeks at a small Field Hospital, in the medication ward, witnessing such horrible destruction of our poor human flesh, such huge gaping wounds, and so many mangled limbs! Let us hope that God in His Divine Mercy will bring this to a speedy, very speedy, end!”

Obviously, as a sergeant in the Medical Corps, he was able to express his solidarity with the wounded, nursing them with tireless devotion, which reached heroic proportions at the time of the retreat from Caporetto, when he took the huge risk of trying to save the medication materials that were so desperately needed at that terrible time. This is the testimony of Professor Giulio Meda, who was a fellow soldier at the time: “When we left Villa Vicentina coll’86ª Sezione di Sanità, not wishing to abandon the huge amounts of medical materials that were supposed to be distributed to the many little hospitals in the zone, Pampuri found an ox-cart pulled by a cow, and defying the torrential rain, he saved the materials. There was complete mayhem everywhere, and every vehicle hurried to overtake Pampuri’s humble means of transport, which he drove for two consecutive days, drenched to the skin in the bitterly cold, driving rain, as far as Latisana, just minutes after the bridge he had just crossed was shelled and destroyed,”

He was cheered by all his comrades when they finally caught up with him, after that two-day odyssey, but the huge effort, the cold and the rain took their toll on him and he suffered a resurgence of the TB bacillus he had been affected with as a young child; he fell ill from pleurisy and while he appeared to recover, in the days where no effective therapy was available, he continued to suffer a slow and inexorable decline, dying of TB on May 1, 1930, the day on which we celebrate his memory in the Liturgy every year as the moment he was born into eternal life.

Brother Giuseppe MAGLIOZZI O.H.