Elia Comini

Elia Comini SDB (born May 7, 1910 in Calvenzano , † October 1, 1944 in Salvaro ) was a Salesian of Don Bosco , was victim of the National Socialist massacre of Salvaro together with other hostages and is therefore considered a martyr in the Roman Catholic Church .

Life

In 1914 his family moved from Calvenzano to “Casetta”, to the Salvaro parish near Grizzana Morandi (Province of Bologna). The pastor there, Fidenzio Mellini, had been in Turin as a soldier and had met Don Bosco there. Because of this encounter he had become a priest himself. In view of the religious, social and intellectual abilities of the young Elijah, he recommended that the parents send the boy to a school run by the Salesians of Don Bosco in Finale Emilia . There Elia Comini decided to become a Salesian of Don Bosco himself. After the novitiate he made his first vows in 1926 in Castel de Britti (Province of Bologna) . He completed his studies in Valsalice and then studied at the State University of Milan . On 16 March 1935 he was in the Cathedral of Brescia , the ordination . The young priest was first employed as a teacher and educator at the Salesian school in Chiara near Brescia and then in the Salesian traineeship in Treviso (Bergama province).

Martyrdom 1944

During the summer of 1944 Comini went to his home parish to visit his mother, who was living alone, and to relieve the pastor there. At that time, however, the area was also the main site of the war between the Allies and the Germans, which resulted in great hardship and almost total destruction. Together with the Dehonian friar Martin Capelli , he stood up for the refugees and the sick and buried the dead. At the same time, at the risk of their own lives, they tried to act as peace brokers between the Allies and the Germans. At the end of September the SS took 69 hostages after a fight with partisans . When the two priests were called on September 29 to come to the pastoral aid of an injured person, they were arrested on the way there by German troops who suspected partisan spies to be in them. They then forced the priests to work before they locked them up together with the hostages in the barn of a spinning mill. When he was offered free time inside the camp, he declined it as a preferential treatment. Eventually they were sentenced to death along with the hostages. After the two priests had confessed to many of the convicts , they were shot on Sunday, October 1, 1944, together with 44 other prisoners in the almost empty water basin of the spinning mill. Only two of the victims survived under the corpses of the others and were able to free themselves after the Germans left. When the water basin was opened a few days later, the bodies were washed into the Reno and were lost.

Beatification process

The diocesan beatification process was opened on December 3, 1995 and completed on November 25, 2001.

literature

• Angelo Carboni, Elia Comini ei confratelli martiti di Marzabotto. 1986
• Joachim Staron, Fosse Ardeatine and Marzabotto: German war crimes and resistance. History and national myth-making in Germany and Italy (1944-1999). 2002

Web links

• Report from the massacre at leodehon.com (German)
• Biblioteca persicetana: Don Elia Comini e Padre Martino Capelli. I martiri di Salvaro (Italian)