Father Juan Manuel Gutiérrez in interview with “EWTN Noticias” anchor Nathalí Paredes on Dec. 19, 2024. / Credit: EWTN Noticias/Screenshot

ACI Prensa Staff, Dec 23, 2024 / 08:00 am (CNA).

Juan Manuel Gutiérrez is a Mexican priest who now serves in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the largest and probably the most diverse in the United States. His name is now forever linked to the young Italian Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died at the age of 24 and who next year, during the 2025 Jubilee, will be declared a saint thanks to the miracle the 38-year-old priest experienced through his intercession.

On Nov. 25, Pope Francis approved the decree of the miracle Gutiérrez received through the intercession of Frassati.

‘I declared myself an atheist’

“My Mexican family was Catholic, my mother was a very Catholic woman; she belonged to the group of women at the church devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe … I received my sacraments as a child, my first Communion, baptism, confirmation, but at the age of 14 or so I began to separate myself from the Church to the point that I stopped attending Mass, I stopped praying,” the priest recounted in an interview with EWTN Noticias, the Spanish-language evening news program of EWTN News.

“I even began to believe that God didn’t exist, that he was a human invention that, as some philosophers say, was like a drug for the masses to control them. And I distanced myself from the Church. For many years I didn’t go to Mass and I declared myself an atheist, that I did not believe in God,” he continued.

His parents separated when he was just 2 years old. His mother stayed in Texcoco, northeast of Mexico City, and his father moved to Omaha, Nebraska. At 19, he decided to join his father and, while there, “by God’s providence, someone also invited me to a retreat, which I didn’t want to go to, but I ended up going and that’s where my return to the Church began.”

He wanted to be convinced in the faith and began to study the history of the Church and about Jesus, and discovered that “there is a lot of historical evidence, even non-Catholic, nonreligious, that gives reasons to believe that Jesus walked the Earth.”

“And what convinced me to remain Catholic is the reality that Jesus is present in the Eucharist, which even with the research of Eucharistic miracles has been scientifically proven. When I began to find all this evidence, all my objections against faith and religion fell one after another.”

Entering the seminary after ‘fighting with [the Lord] for a long time’

According to Angelus News, Gutiérrez began his formation for the priesthood when he was 26 years old, in 2013, at the Juan Diego House of Formation of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. 

He graduated in 2017 and together with his classmates went on to St. John’s Seminary to continue their priestly formation. He was ordained in June 2022.

“It was a very long fight with the Lord, because I had other plans, good plans in my opinion, Catholic, to have my family, to have my children, to dedicate myself to the ministry or any opportunity I had, but it never crossed my mind to be a priest,” he shared with EWTN News.

It was not until “by the providence of God, those questions came to me from different directions, priests who knew me, people from the parish who saw me go to Mass every day, being involved in different activities of my church.”

“Even in prayer the Lord began to present the proposal of a vocation to the priesthood and after fighting with him for a long time, as Jeremiah said, ‘Lord, you have seduced me,’ and I let myself be seduced, I decided to give myself the opportunity to enter the seminary,” he recalled.

The heat, the Holy Spirit, and the miracle by Pier Giorgio Frassati

In October 2017, while playing basketball with other seminarians, Gutiérrez tore his Achilles tendon. An MRI on Oct. 31 confirmed the injury, and on Nov. 1, the solemnity of All Saints, he decided to pray a novena to Blessed Frassati to ask for help with his ailment.

“I was inspired to pray to Pier Giorgio Frassati, and that same day I began [the novena]. A few days after beginning my novena, I went to pray in the seminary chapel. I was alone, there was no one else, and I knelt down to pray. And while I was praying, I began to feel a sensation of heat in the area of ​​my injured heel.”

“I initially thought it was due to a fire, that maybe an electrical outlet was on fire, and since we have books under the pews, I thought maybe the fire was due to that. But when I checked, there was no sign of fire, there was no burning smell, and I began to notice that the sensation of heat was in the area of ​​my injury, of the tear,” the priest continued.

“And I began to remember that in many Catholic spiritualities, such as the charismatic, people described that when the Holy Spirit is doing a healing in a person, the person describes the sensation of heat.”

The priest confessed that he didn’t believe it was possible that he was healing, “not because God didn’t have the power to do so, but because I believed that I didn’t have the faith for such a thing, and that moved me deeply, and moved me to tears. And after I finished praying that day, I continued with my normal activities.”

The doctor’s surprise: ‘Someone up there is taking care of you’

Since he suffered the injury, Gutiérrez had been wearing an ankle brace, but he stopped wearing it after what happened in the chapel. On Nov. 15, six days after finishing his novena, he went to see the surgeon who was going to operate on him.

The priest said the surgeon looked at the images of the injury on the computer, did the Thompson test on him, which checks for a tear, but found nothing and, in addition, the then-seminarian simply felt no pain in the area that had been affected.

The doctor then told him that surgery didn’t seem to be necessary. “And I asked him why and he told me that when he examined me, when he tried to touch the place of the fissure with his finger, he should be able to touch the hole, the fissure that the tear leaves, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t find it. And since he knew that I was a seminarian, I only remember that he told me ‘there must be someone up there who is taking care of you.’”

“And when he told me that, I felt like a shiver that ran through my entire body because at that moment I remembered the event in the chapel where I had the sensation of heat in the area of ​​my injury, of the tear. And I remembered my novena to Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati.”

The doctor told him that the MRI was correct, that on Oct. 31 a tear in the Achilles tendon was seen, that these types of injuries did not heal on their own but, on the contrary, worsen over time. Then, at the request of the then-31-year-old seminarian, the doctor gave him the medical documents of the case because he simply did not require any medical attention.

“I returned to the seminary. It gave me great joy, I felt a lot of emotion, but at the same time I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, so I tried to keep it as secret as possible.” In fact, he didn’t even mention it to his family, only to a few people.

His relationship with Frassati: ‘A friendship that cannot be described’

The priest recalled that when he prayed the novena “I wasn’t asking for healing, I was asking for God’s help with my injury. And I initially thought of doing it to all the saints, because it occurred to me, ‘Well, today is the day of the solemnity of All Saints and I need all the help I can get.’ But then I received this inspiration that said to me, why don’t you do the novena to Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati? And I was a little surprised, but it seemed like a good idea, and that’s why I did it to him.”

“I thought that this secret, so to speak, I was going to take with me to the grave. I did promise during my novena that if something unusual happened, I would report it to whoever I needed to report it, [but] I never imagined that this would become the miracle that the Vatican would accept for the canonization of Pier Giorgio.”

One of the people with whom he shared what had happened was a professor of his, who then took the case to the Vatican. Then it was decided to open a formal investigation.

After pointing out that the investigation being conducted by the Vatican, in which one of his professors at the seminary participated, is “extremely rigorous,” Gutiérrez commented that “the Lord is the one who chose to give me this connection, this friendship with Pier Giorgio. And it was the Lord who planned that of all the miracles and graces that people have received around the world through Pier Giorgio’s intercession, this would be the event that would lead to his canonization.”

Regarding his relationship with the future Italian saint, the priest said that “it’s like a friendship that cannot be described. One has human friendships, good ones and so on, but this is something different. It’s something that fills me with joy, that fills me with peace, that also challenges me now as a priest to be a better witness of being a Christian.”

The Mexican priest also highlighted that “Pier Giorgio was very fond of mountain climbing, of going on hikes in the mountains. And it was not a quality that I thought I had much, but it is something that little by little I am embracing a little more and I feel, when I have done it and I have gone to the mountains to walk, I even feel his closeness.”

“Also to be brave: that the Christianity that one lives also comes to manifest itself in social areas of life, because that’s something that he did a lot. At his young age, in his youth, he knew that his Christianity was not just to stay within the walls of the church. In his social life, in the context of society, of politics, of his country, he knew that the values ​​of the Gospel, of Christianity, had to influence those areas of human life,” Gutiérrez emphasized.

Speaking about the canonization during the 2025 Jubilee, the priest from Los Angeles affirmed that “once again, providence, the hand of the Lord that writes our history is everywhere, because next year also marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Pier Giorgio.” It’s “a gift of God’s providence that is amazing,” he added.

“I am hoping to go, this is my hope, to be able to go,” he said.

Who was Blessed Pier Gorgio Frassati?

Pier Giorgio Frassati was born on Holy Saturday, April 6, 1901. He was the son of the founder and director of the Italian newspaper La Stampa.

At the age of 17, he joined the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and devoted much of his free time to caring for the poor, the homeless, and the sick, as well as veterans returning from World War I.

Frassati was also involved in the Apostleship of Prayer and Catholic Action. He was a daily communicant.

Frassati died of polio on July 4, 1925, a disease he apparently contracted while caring for the sick. He was only 24 years old.

St. John Paul II, who beatified Frassati in 1990, called him “a man of the Eight Beatitudes,” describing him as “totally immersed in the mystery of God and totally dedicated to the constant service of his neighbor.”

Pope Francis praised Frassati for sharing Jesus’ love with the poor in a talk on June 24: “Pier Giorgio was from a well-off upper-middle-class family, but he didn’t grow up in the lap of luxury, he didn’t get lost in the ‘good life,’ because inside him there was the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit, there was love for Jesus and for his brothers.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.