Blessed Odoardo Focherini (1907-1944)

Dec. 1, 2023

By Columbia staff

Dec. 1, 2023

Blessed Odoardo Focherini

An Italian journalist and father of seven, Odoardo Focherini risked his life to save scores of persecuted Jews during World War II. Eventually arrested, he testified that he acted solely out of “pure Christian charity.”

Focherini was born in the northern Italian city of Carpi, the third of four sons. He met his future wife, Maria, during a vacation to Trento; they married in 1930. Focherini was a devoted husband and father and took an active role in the life of the Church. He worked as an agent for a Catholic insurance company and later served as managing editor of the Catholic newspaper L’Avvenire d’Italia. As president of Catholic Action in Carpi, he organized many events, including Eucharistic congresses.

In 1942, when a group of Polish Jews arrived by train in Genoa, the archbishop, Cardinal Pietro Boetto, enlisted Focherini to help them avoid deportation. After receiving his wife’s blessing to undertake such a dangerous mission, Focherini procured counterfeit documents for their passage to Switzerland. Thus began a clandestine rescue operation that brought more than 100 Jewish refugees to safety.

Arrested on March 11, 1944, Focherini was moved to several prisons before arriving at a Nazi concentration camp in Hersbruck, Germany. During his imprisonment, he wrote 166 letters to his wife and others. “If you had seen … how Jews are treated here,” he wrote, “your only regrets would be not to have saved more of them.”

Odoardo Focherini died Dec. 27, 1944, of an untreated leg infection; he was 37 years old. His last words, spoken to a fellow prisoner, were “Tell my wife that I have always remained faithful to her, always thought of her and always intensely loved her.” He was beatified in 2013.

Blessed Odoardo Focherini (1907-1944)

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