Artemide Zatti

Artemide Zatti (often known in Spanish as Artémides Zatti) was born on 12 October 1880 in Boretto, in the province of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, to Luigi Zatti and Albina Vecchi. He grew up in a poor rural household and received a simple Catholic formation with limited formal schooling. In 1897 economic hardship led the family to emigrate to Argentina, where they settled at Bahía Blanca in the province of Buenos Aires. There the adolescent Zatti encountered the Salesians of Don Bosco, who worked among Italian immigrants. Drawn by their practical charity, he entered Salesian formation as an aspirant and began studies with a view to the priesthood.

While still a student he nursed a priest dying of tuberculosis and himself contracted the disease around the opening of the twentieth century. He was sent to the Salesian house at Viedma, in the Patagonian province of Río Negro, whose climate was thought more favorable. There he promised Mary Help of Christians that if he recovered he would devote his life to the sick. His health improved, but the illness ended his path to ordination. He remained in the congregation as a coadjutor brother, making his first profession in 1908 and perpetual profession a few years later. Under the priest-pharmacist Evasio Garrone he trained in nursing and pharmacy and obtained a pharmacist’s diploma.

For more than four decades Zatti served as nurse, pharmacist, and administrator of the San José hospital attached to the Salesian community in Viedma, and he also attended patients across the river in Carmen de Patagones. He became a familiar figure cycling through the town with his medicine bag, visiting the poor in their homes and admitting anyone in need regardless of means. He combined professional competence with a reputation for cheerfulness, evangelical poverty, and tireless availability, and was popularly spoken of as a relative of the poor. When civil authorities later took over the hospital buildings, he continued the work in whatever quarters the community could provide. In 1950 he was found to have cancer; he died in Viedma on 15 March 1951.

Zatti’s reputation for holiness spread among the people of Patagonia and within the Salesian family. A cause for beatification was introduced, and Pope John Paul II beatified him on 14 April 2002. Pope Francis canonized him on 9 October 2022, presenting him as a model of consecrated brotherhood and of Christian care for the sick on the missionary frontier of southern Argentina. His liturgical memorial is kept on 15 March.