388 - PRAYER AND LABOR

First Encounter with Father Piamarta - By Pier Giordano Cabra

Chapter Six

1. The Artigianelli Institution was established precisely in the middle of the historic center of the city, an environment that for thousands of years had been permeated by the Spirit of Saint Benedict, whose motto was “ora et labora”. When Napoleon had suppressed the feminine Benedictine Monastery of Saint Julia, its rooms were used as barracks, while the large vegetable garden was left uncultivated. It was in here that Father Piamarta chose to revive the Benedictine Spirit making it a citadel of work; or rather one of “piety and labor”, of prayer and work, of the work that comes from prayer, and of a job that becomes the means to gain both this and the future life.

2. He lived an example of the symbiosis between prayer and work. He woke up very early, at four in the morning--often at three with Holy Mass--and prayed for two hours. Before opening a window towards earth, he opened one towards heaven to receive light and strength. Then, all day he had to think of everything; it seemed he needed everything. He had to be concerned with many things he hadn’t the competency for, but felt it his duty to undertake “for love, only for love” of his boys. How could he say no to a widow with sons, one piggyback on the other, who asked him with tears to receive at least one? How could he send away a Pastor who came bringing a boy--a boy, sad and afraid, whose parents were dead? How could he not find a place for that apparently arrogant boy, who did not know where he would sleep for the night? For his boys, Father Piamarta had to provide many places: one for eating, a dormitory, a factory, a school, a church, one for recreation... It was required to install lavatories, buy machinery, hire reliable contractors, find generous benefactors; but he was so reluctant to ask….

3. In the evening he would finish the day with a long stop in the church to thank God, after he had run after boys, contractors, bricklayers, debated with someone who wanted to cheat him…. Or on the hardest days said a painful “no” to some insistent request to receive a new boy: “we do not have any place available.”

4. They whispered he would fail soon, because he was “a poet of the economy”… However, on the field he learned economy without losing either the poetry of the high things of the Spirit or of the ordinary life. “We save money to accept more orphans” he said frequently. “If we do our part, Providence will do the same”.

5. Of the factories, he began with a printing press, the “Queriniana”, a name that comes from the erudite Cardinal Querini, a Bishop of Brescia in the first half of the 18th century; it would become the cradle of a vigorous catholic civic press. Other factories and activities would follow: construction working, woodworking, blacksmiths, dressmaking, bakeries, shoe-making, machine design, electrician training, and lots of initiatives to develop skills and craftsmanship, to offer his boys the best… Lots of “tribulations and thorns,” ...also lots of children saved from misery and the street and on the path to become “good artisans, good Christians, and excellent citizens”. Some years later, in the boom of the industry, a newspaper would be able to write: “A good part of the workforce of the prosperous industry of Brescia came from the Artigianelli Institution”.

6. Father Piamarta wanted to educate completed men who, with one foot on the earth and a heart pointed towards heaven would be able to face “the here and now” and “the always”; men who would a desire to live up to themselves in this life and to be honored in the next life; men who would live as worthy citizens of their earthly homeland and happy citizens of the celestial homeland. Lots of people proved that this work was not useless.

                                                                           Traduzione a cura di Mary Levine e Matteo Toschi