(Instituto Superior Juan 23, Bahía Blanca) – On Sunday, October 9, 2022, the Church celebrated the canonization of Salesian coadjutor Br. Artemide Zatti, the nurse who dedicated his life to the care, healing and accompaniment of the sick. Mónica García Zatti, a teacher at the “Juan XXIII” higher education institute in Bahía Blanca and a collateral line descendant of the new saint, also spoke about this world event.
Monica Garcia Zatti has been a teacher in the Institute’s Mathematics Department since 2009 and has probably passed by the school’s lecture hall named after her saintly relative dozens of times. Her maternal grandfather was a first cousin of Artemide. “As a family we are experiencing all this with great excitement and pride, because he is an example of life and dedication. I have a small book about him that I always carry with me,” the professor said, manifesting the devotion she feels for the new saint.
“Artemide has always been an important figure in our family. My grandfather used to tell us about his life and everything he gave up to devote himself to caring for the sick and needy. He always pointed us to his example and taught us that we should ask for his intercession whenever there was a health problem”
As a child, Mónica lived in the town of Cabildo, a village 50 kilometers from Bahía Blanca. “With several cousins we lived in the same house. In the family we called him ‘el tío,’ the uncle, and I also have a cousin who became a nurse precisely because of the story of Artemide. She used to hitchhike to Bahía to study and always carried a holy card of Artemide with her so that he would take care of her.”
When the news broke last April that Zatti would be proclaimed a saint, great excitement developed in their family. “We always knew what he had done, but we had no awareness of the dimension and importance of his figure, and what he meant to the lives of so many people. When I was teaching at ‘La Inmaculada’ Institute I learned about his beatification because another teacher told me about it, and since then we have received information from people in many countries who contacted us to tell us about their vocation and Artemide’s intercession in their health.”
Artémides Zatti was born in Boretto, in northern Italy, in 1880, and emigrated with his family to Argentina at the age of 17. He settled in Bahía Blanca, where he began working in a tile factory. Since childhood he knew poverty, uprooting and disease. At the age of 20 he entered the Salesian Family in Bahía Blanca. Serious pulmonary congestion caused by tuberculosis that he contracted while caring for a priest prevented him from entering the novitiate. Transferred by this circumstance to the Viedma hospital, Artémides accepted his illness and put himself in the hands of María Auxiliadora. The chaplain of the establishment and her superior told her: “If She cures you, I invite you to dedicate yourself to these patients throughout your life.” Zatti believed in Maria’s help, promised to dedicate himself to the sick, he was cured and kept her promise: he dedicated himself to the sick, to the maintenance and administration of the Hospital.
Artemide Zatti’s very special life story and vocation meant that his reputation as a holy nurse was known throughout the region and patients came to him from all over Patagonia. And he would visit his patients on his bicycle at all hours. In the simplicity of his life, his service, his deep life of faith, his sense of community and his good humor, his contemporaries saw a person who had found a way to be happy and who was very much like Jesus.
Monica is still moved when she tells her story and that of her family. “My mother, my uncle, my cousins, those who are here and those who are ‘upstairs,’ in Heaven, we are all celebrating this good news, which reinforces the example that Zatti has always been for us.”
More information on the life of the Salesian coadjutor saint is available at: https://zatti.org
Autora: Inés Gea
Source: Salesianos Don Bosco – ARS