GIACOMO da POIRINO. – In the world Luigi Marocco. An Observant Friar Minor, born at Poirino on 10 March 1808 and deceased at Madonna degli Angeli (Turin) on 30 September 1885, he was curate of S. Maria degli Angeli in Turin, within whose parish district the Cavour family belonged. He became intimate with the family and won the friendship of the great statesman. In 1854, when cholera was raging and foreseeing that the situation that had occurred in 1850 with the minister Count Santarosa might occur in his own case, Count Cavour had Fr. G. summoned and instructed him (Massari relates) «how matters were to proceed should he come to the point of death». When Cavour was struck by the inexorable illness 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 provided with all the Sacraments. This led people to suppose that everything had taken place in accordance with canonical prescriptions; solemn religious funerals were consequently celebrated in many places. But a denial by the Marquis Gustavo Cavour, published in the newspapers, which rejected any retraction, caused a great stir throughout the Catholic world, and many bishops and several apostolic nuncios requested instructions from Rome.
Pius IX ordered the representative of the Holy See and the vicar general of Turin to inform him exactly how matters had proceeded; but Fr. G., when questioned, withdrew into a mysterious and obstinate silence. Thinking that he acted thus for fear of reprisals, they summoned him to Rome, where he arrived bearing instructions from the government, which paid the travel expenses and entrusted him to the protection of the Sardinian consul, Count Teccio di Bajo. Neither to his own superiors nor to Pius IX, who personally questioned him, did Fr. G. reveal the truth, limiting himself to general statements that he had done his duty and was at peace in conscience: he could say no more because he was bound by the sacramental seal. They tried in vain to persuade him that the fact of the retraction was not in itself subject to the sacramental bond: he did not retreat from the position he had taken. The Pope therefore deprived him of the faculty to hear confessions, 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 Mauritian Order and a modest pension, for eminent services rendered to the fatherland. He ended his days miserably and died, Masera says, «in the most desolate abandonment». He left some memoirs, published by Mazziotti, in which the episode is covered by the usual reserve.