GIACOMO da POIRINO.— Born Luigi Marocco. Observant Franciscan, born at Poirino on 10 March 1808, died at the Madonna degli Angeli (Turin) on 30 September 1885. He served as vice-curate of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Turin, whose parish included the Cavour family. He became closely acquainted with them and won the friendship of the great statesman. In 1854, when cholera was raging and fearing that he might suffer the same fate as the minister Count of Sant'Ansa in 1850, Cavour summoned Fr. G. and instructed him (as Massari relates) “on how things should proceed in the event of his dying.” When Cavour was struck down by the inexorable disease that carried him to the grave on 6 June 1861, Fr. G. was in fact summoned to his bedside, and an official communiqué announced that the Count had died fortified by all the Sacraments. This led to the assumption that everything had occurred in conformity with canonical prescriptions, and solemn religious funerals were celebrated in many places. But a denial by the Marquis Gustavo Cavour, published in the newspapers, which denied any retraction, caused great consternation throughout the Catholic world, and many bishops and various apostolic nuncios sought instructions from Rome.
Pius IX ordered the chargé d’affaires of the Holy See and the Vicar General of Turin to inform him exactly of how things had transpired; but Fr. G., when questioned, responded only with a mysterious and obstinate silence. Supposing that he acted thus out of fear of reprisals, he was summoned to Rome, where he arrived furnished with instructions from the government, which paid for his journey and placed him under the protection of the Sardinian consul Count Teccio di Bajo. Neither to his superiors nor to Pius IX, who questioned him personally, did Fr. G. reveal the truth, confining himself to vague declarations that he had done his duty and was at peace in conscience: he could say no more because he was bound by sacramental secrecy. Attempts were vainly made to persuade him that the fact of a retraction was not in itself subject to sacramental secrecy; he did not yield from the positions he had taken. The Pope therefore deprived him of the faculty of hearing confessions, a faculty which was not restored to him until twenty years later by Leo XIII. Fr. G. was rewarded by the government with the insignia of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus and a modest pension, for distinguished services rendered to the fatherland. He ended his days miserably, dying, as Masera says, “in the most desolate abandonment.” He left some memoirs, published by Mazzitotti, in which the episode is shrouded in the usual reserve.