From football to mass

Samuel Piermarini He dreamed of playing soccer and was on his way until he felt God's call. The 28-year-old Italian exporter was close to signing for the youth of the Rome in 2011 when he decided to hang up his boots to put on the cure habit: “They were looking for a second goalkeeper for the U17 youth competition of the Italian championship, and after the test, coach Andrea Stramaccioni called me and told me that I could sign. Instead of football, I choose the cassock, “he told himself ten years ago.

Piermarini will be ordained priest this Sunday by Pope Francis. The Italian, a confessed Juventus fan, maintains his hobby under the sticks of the Redemptoris Mater on the Clericus Cup, a tournament disputed by priests and seminarians from the pontifical universities. The Italian has recounted his arrival at the Church in the Corriere della Sera: “I felt that I was not called to do this, there. My life, my whole life, was elsewhere. I had a girlfriend, school, soccer, friends who told me: what have you done? But there was that question in me: Lord, are you not calling me to another life? That was the beginning of discernment. The priests he had met and seen happy. The stories of the Mexican missionary Bernardo Torres who will put the chasuble on me on Sunday. Two years of mission in Brazil, the years of the seminary. And the six months as a deacon with the parish priest Francesco Zanoni, in San Juan Bautista de la Salle, in the Roman district of EUR, a wonderful experience “.

A whole change that took him from football to an ecclesiastical path: “I started making uncomfortable excuses, I don't know if I felt like it, and then who accompanied me to training sessions, and meanwhile there was the imperturbable coach who looked at me with the air of who think: are you stupid? “