Giuseppe Beotti

Giuseppe Beotti was an Italian Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Piacenza who was killed in 1944 during the German occupation of northern Italy. He was born on 26 August 1912 in the hamlet of Gahro, in the province of Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna. He entered the diocesan seminary, completed the usual course of philosophical and theological studies, and was ordained a priest on 15 June 1938. In 1940 he was appointed parish priest of Sidolo, a small mountain village in the municipality of Bardi in the same province, where he served a rural community with the ordinary round of Mass, sacraments, catechesis, and care for the poor.

After the armistice of September 1943 the war reached the Apennine valleys in earnest. Sidolo lay in a zone of partisan activity, German reprisals, and civilian flight. Beotti used the rectory and the parish as places of refuge. He sheltered Jews escaping racial persecution and deportation, assisted young men who refused conscription into the forces of the Italian Social Republic, and helped other displaced civilians with food and lodging. Witnesses later described him as remaining at his post, continuing to preach and to celebrate the sacraments even when that ministry exposed him to danger.

On 20 July 1944 a detachment of German SS troops entered Sidolo. Beotti was arrested together with two other local men. The three were taken a short distance from the village and shot. Beotti was thirty-one years old. The Catholic Church later judged that he had been killed in odium fidei, that is, out of hatred for the faith, because of his priestly identity and his protection of those whom the occupation regime sought to destroy or coerce.

His memory was kept in the Diocese of Piacenza-Bobbio, which opened a cause of beatification. After the diocesan inquiry and the Roman process, Pope Francis recognized his martyrdom. The beatification rite was celebrated on 30 September 2023 in the Cathedral of Piacenza, with Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, presiding as papal delegate. Beotti is commemorated on 20 July, the anniversary of his death, and is venerated as a blessed of the Catholic Church.