Incorruptibility of Pier Giorgio Frassati

Body exhumed in 1981 during beatification cause — 56 years after death from poliomyelitis. Found incorrupt: limbs flexible and soft, skin described as fresh and rosy. Transferred from family mausoleum in Pollone to Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin. Displayed at World Youth Day in Sydney (2008). Brought to Rome for veneration during the Jubilee of Youth (July–August 2025). Body later showed signs of decomposition.

Pier Giorgio Frassati died on July 4, 1925, at the age of twenty-four, from poliomyelitis he had likely contracted while ministering to the sick poor of Turin. He was buried in the family mausoleum in Pollone, in the Piedmont countryside.

In 1981, during the formal canonical process for his beatification, his coffin was opened. His body was found to be incorrupt — free of the decomposition that would ordinarily follow fifty-six years in the grave. Witnesses described his limbs as still flexible and soft, his skin as fresh and rosy, his appearance likened to a man sleeping rather than long dead.

His remains were transferred from Pollone to the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, where they have been enshrined for public veneration. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on May 20, 1990.

In 2008, his relics were displayed at World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia. In the summer of 2025, ahead of his canonization, his body was brought to the Basilica of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome for veneration during the Jubilee of Youth — where tens of thousands of young pilgrims came to pray before him. He was canonized by Pope Leo XIV on September 7, 2025.

At some point after the initial exhumation, subsequent examinations observed that the body had begun to show signs of natural decomposition — an outcome consistent with most cases of incorruptibility, which are rarely permanent. The Church has not formally adjudicated the incorruptibility as a canonical miracle; it was observed in the course of the beatification process and has been widely noted in accounts of Frassati's life.