Born in Ferentino, Italy (just outside of Rome), Giuseppe Morosini was ordained to the priesthood in 1937, the same year Benito Mussolini pledged Italy’s support for Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Morosini served as a military chaplain, and by the early 1940s he was sent by his Vincentian order to Rome to provide aid to displaced children at Ermenegildo Pistelli School.
The school, which is still standing today, became a secret base for the Italian Resistance Movement (the partigiani), where Morosini provided weapons, intelligence, provisions and spiritual guidance.
However, the Gestapo had a mole within this resistance cell, which eventually led to Morosini’s arrest in January 1944, according to Crux News.
Tortured repeatedly by the Nazis, Morosini refused to provide details regarding the Resistance. One survivor who met Morosini in prison later offered this memory of their encounter:
“Held at Regina Coeli by the Germans, one morning I met Don Giuseppe Morosini. He was coming out of an interrogation by the SS, his swollen face dripping with blood like Christ during his passion. With tears in my eyes, I tried to signal my solidarity. He tried to smile back, which made his lips bleed. His eyes, however, shone with a living light, the light of his faith. He blessed his own firing squad while shouting ‘God forgive them, they know not what they do,’ like Christ on Golgotha. The memory of this noble martyr lives in my soul, and it will live there forever.”
He was gunned down by a firing squad on April 13, 1944; he was 31 years old.
A year later, on April 25, 1945, a nationwide radio broadcast was sent out calling for a popular uprising and general strike against the Nazi occupation and Fascist regime by the National Liberation Committee of Upper Italy (CLNAI), a political umbrella organization representing the Italian resistance movement.
Three days later, Mussolini was dead.
Morosini was posthumously awarded Italy’s highest civilian honor, and to this day, there’s a small square named for him in our neighborhood.
