By Redaktor strony 
Reading time: 9 min.
The path of the 2025 Jubilee, dedicated to Hope, finds a shining witness in the story of the Servant of God Nino Baglieri. From the dramatic fall that left him tetraplegic at seventeen to his inner rebirth in 1978, Baglieri moved from the shadow of despair to the light of active faith, transforming his bed of suffering into a throne of joy. His story intertwines the five Jubilee signs – pilgrimage, door, profession of faith, charity, and reconciliation – showing that Christian hope is not escapism but a strength that opens the future and supports every journey.
1. Hoping as Waiting
Hope, according to the online Treccani dictionary, is a feeling of “trustful expectation in the present or future fulfillment of what is desired.” The etymology of the noun “hope” comes from the Latin spes, which in turn derives from the Sanskrit root spa- meaning to stretch toward a goal. In Spanish, “to hope” and “to wait” are both translated with the verb esperar, which combines both meanings in one word: as if one could only wait for what one hopes for. This state of mind allows us to face life and its challenges with courage and a heart always burning with light. Hope is expressed – positively or negatively – in some popular proverbs: “Hope is the last to die,” “While there is life, there is hope,” “He who lives by hope dies in despair.”
Almost gathering this “shared feeling” about hope, but aware of the need to help rediscover hope in its fullest and truest dimension, Pope Francis dedicated the Ordinary Jubilee of 2025 to Hope (Spes non confundit [Hope does not disappoint] is the bull of convocation) and already in 2014 said: “The resurrection of Jesus is not the happy ending of a beautiful fairy tale; it is not the happy end of a movie; it is the intervention of God the Father where human hope breaks down. At the moment when everything seems lost, in the moment of pain, when many people feel the need to get down from the cross, that is the moment closest to the resurrection. The night becomes darkest just before the morning begins, before the light begins. In the darkest moment God intervenes and raises up” (cf. Audience of 16 April 2014).
In this context, the story of the Servant of God Nino Baglieri (Modica, May 1, 1951 – March 2, 2007) fits perfectly. As a seventeen-year-old bricklayer, he fell from a seventeen-meter-high scaffold due to the sudden collapse of a plank, crashing to the ground and becoming tetraplegic: from that fall on May 6, 1968, he could only move his head and neck, depending on others for life in everything, even the simplest and humblest things. Nino could not even shake a friend’s hand or caress his mother… and saw his dreams vanish. What hope for life did this young man have now? What feelings could he face? What future awaited him? Nino’s first response was despair, total darkness before a search for meaning that found no answer. First a long wandering through hospitals in different Italian regions, then the pity of friends and acquaintances led Nino to rebel and lock himself away in ten long years of loneliness and anger, while the tunnel of life grew ever deeper.
In Greek mythology, Zeus entrusts Pandora with a jar containing all the evils of the world; when opened, men lose immortality and begin a life of suffering. To save them, Pandora reopens the jar and releases elpis, hope, which remained at the bottom. It was the only antidote to life’s troubles. Looking instead to the Giver of all good, we know that “hope does not disappoint” (Rom 5:5). Pope Francis writes in Spes non confundit: “In the sign of this hope, the apostle Paul encourages the Christian community in Rome […] Everyone hopes. In the heart of every person is enclosed hope as desire and expectation of good, even without knowing what tomorrow will bring. The unpredictability of the future, however, gives rise to sometimes opposing feelings: from trust to fear, from serenity to discouragement, from certainty to doubt. We often meet discouraged people who look to the future with skepticism and pessimism, as if nothing could offer them happiness. May the Jubilee be an opportunity for all to revive hope” (ibid., 1).
2. From Witness of “Despair” to “Ambassador” of Hope
Let us return to the story of our Servant of God, Nino Baglieri.
Ten long years had to pass before Nino emerged from the tunnel of despair, the thick darkness cleared, and Light entered. It was the afternoon of March 24, Good Friday 1978, when Father Aldo Modica, with a group of young people, went to Nino’s home, urged by his mother Peppina and some people involved in the Renewal in the Spirit movement, then in its early days in the nearby Salesian parish. Nino writes, “While they invoked the Holy Spirit, I felt a very strange sensation, a great warmth invaded my body, a strong tingling in all my limbs, as if a new strength entered me and something old left. At that moment I said my ‘yes’ to the Lord, accepted my cross, and was reborn to a new life, becoming a new man. Ten years of despair erased in a few moments, because an unknown joy entered my heart. I desired the healing of my body, but the Lord granted me an even greater grace: spiritual healing.”
A new path began for Nino: from “witness of despair” he became a “pilgrim of hope.” No longer isolated in his little room but an “ambassador” of this hope, he shared his experience through a broadcast on a local radio station and – an even greater grace – God gave him the joy of being able to write with his mouth. Nino confides: “In March 1979 the Lord performed a great miracle for me: I learned to write with my mouth. I started like this; I was with my friends doing homework, I asked for a pencil and a notebook, I began making marks and drawing something, but then I discovered I could write, and so I began to write.” He then began to write his memoirs and correspond with people of all kinds around the world, thousands of letters still preserved today. The regained hope made him creative; now Nino rediscovered the joy of relationships and wanted to become – as much as he could – independent. With a stick he used with his mouth and an elastic band attached to the phone, he dialed numbers to communicate with many sick people, offering them words of comfort. He discovered a new way to face his suffering, which brought him out of isolation and set him on the path to becoming a witness to the Gospel of joy and hope. “Now there is so much joy in my heart, there is no more pain in me, in my heart there is Your love. Thank you, my Lord Jesus, from my bed of pain I want to praise you and with all my heart thank you because you called me to know life, to know true life.”
Nino changed perspective, made a 360° turn – the Lord gave him conversion – and placed his trust in that merciful God who, through “misfortune,” called him to work in His vineyard, to be a sign and instrument of salvation and hope. Thus, many who came to console him left comforted, with tears in their eyes. They did not find on that little bed a sad and gloomy man, but a smiling face that radiated – despite many sufferings, including bedsores and respiratory problems – the joy of living; the smile was constant on his face, and Nino felt “useful from the bed of the cross.” Nino Baglieri is the opposite of many people today, constantly searching for the meaning of life, aiming for easy success and the happiness of fleeting and worthless things, living online, consuming life with a click, wanting everything immediately but with sad, dull eyes. Nino apparently had nothing, yet he had peace and joy in his heart. He did not live isolated but supported by God’s love expressed through the embrace and presence of his entire family and more and more people who knew him and connected with him.
3. Rekindling Hope
Building hope means that every time I am not satisfied with my life and I commit to changing it. Every time I do not let negative experiences harden me or make me distrustful. Every time I fall and try to get up, not allowing fears to have the last word. Every time, in a world marked by conflicts, I choose trust and always try again, with everyone. Every time I do not flee from God’s dream that tells me, “I want you to be happy,” “I want you to have a full life… full even of holiness.” The pinnacle of the virtue of hope is indeed a gaze toward Heaven to live well on earth or, as Don Bosco would say, walking with feet on the ground and heart in Heaven.
In this furrow of hope, the Jubilee finds fulfillment, which, with its signs, asks us to set out, to cross some frontiers.
First sign, the pilgrimage: when moving from one place to another, one is open to the new, to change. Jesus’ whole life was “a setting out,” a journey of evangelization fulfilled in the gift of life and beyond, with the Resurrection and Ascension.
Second sign, the door: in John 10:9 Jesus says, “I am the door; if anyone enters through me, he will be saved; he will come in and go out and find pasture.” Passing through the door means being welcomed, being community. The Gospel also speaks of the “narrow door”: the Jubilee becomes a path of conversion.
Third sign, the profession of faith: expressing belonging to Christ and the Church and declaring it publicly.
Fourth sign, charity: charity is the password to heaven; in 1 Peter 4:8 the apostle Peter admonishes, “Keep fervent in your love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins.”
Fifth sign, therefore, reconciliation and Jubilee indulgence: it is a “favorable time” (cf. 2 Cor 6:2) to experience God’s great mercy and walk paths of rapprochement and forgiveness toward others; to live the prayer of the Our Father where we ask, “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” It is becoming new creatures.
Even in Nino’s life, there are episodes that connect him – along the “thread” of hope – to these Jubilee dimensions. For example, his repentance for some childhood mischiefs, like when three of them (he recounts), “stole the offerings from the sacristy during Masses, we used them to play foosball. When you meet bad companions, they lead you astray. Then one took the Oratory keys and hid them in my schoolbag in the study; they found the keys, called the parents, gave us two slaps, and kicked us out of school. Shame!” But above all, in Nino’s life there is charity, helping the poor person in physical and moral trial, reaching out to those with psychological struggles, and writing to brothers in prison to testify to them God’s goodness and love. Nino, who before the fall had been a bricklayer, writes, “[I] liked to build with my hands something that would last over time: even now I feel like a bricklayer working in God’s Kingdom, to leave something that lasts, to see the Wonderful Works of God that He accomplishes in our Life.” He confides, “My body seems dead, but my heart keeps beating in my chest. My legs do not move, yet I walk the paths of the world.”
4. Pilgrim Toward Heaven
Nino, a consecrated Salesian cooperator of the great Salesian Family, ended his earthly “pilgrimage” on Friday, March 2, 2007, at 8:00 a.m., at only 55 years old, having spent 39 years tetraplegic between bed and wheelchair, after asking forgiveness from his family for the hardships his condition caused. He left this world dressed in tracksuit and sneakers, as he expressly requested, to run in the green flowering meadows and leap like a deer along the streams. We read in his spiritual Testament, “I will never stop thanking you, O Lord, for having called me to You through the Cross on May 6, 1968. A heavy cross for my young strength…” On March 2, life – a continuous gift that begins with parents and is slowly nurtured with wonder and beauty – placed the most important piece for Nino Baglieri: the embrace with his Lord and God, accompanied by the Madonna.
At the news of his passing, a unanimous chorus rose from many quarters: “a saint has died,” a man who made his bed of the cross the banner of a full life, a gift for all. Thus, a great witness of hope.
Five years after his death, as provided by the Normae Servandae in Inquisitionibus ab Episcopis faciendis in Causis Sanctorum of 1983, the bishop of the Diocese of Noto, at the request of the Postulator General of the Salesian Congregation, after consulting the Sicilian Episcopal Conference and obtaining the Nihil obstat from the Holy See, opened the Diocesan Inquiry for the Cause of Beatification and Canonization of the Servant of God Nino Baglieri.
The diocesan process, lasting 12 years, followed two main lines: the work of the Historical Commission, which researched, collected, studied, and presented many sources, especially writings “by” and “about” the Servant of God; and the Ecclesiastical Tribunal, responsible for the Inquiry, which also heard witnesses under oath.
This process concluded on May 5, 2024, in the presence of Monsignor Salvatore Rumeo, current bishop of the Diocese of Noto. A few days later, the procedural acts were delivered to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, which opened them on June 21, 2024. At the beginning of 2025, the same Dicastery declared their “Legal Validity,” allowing the Roman phase of the Cause to enter full swing.
Now the contribution to the Cause continues also by spreading knowledge of Nino’s figure, who at the end of his earthly journey recommended: “Do not leave me doing nothing. I will continue my mission from heaven. I will write to you from Paradise.”
The journey of hope in his company thus becomes a longing for Heaven, when “we will meet face to face with the infinite beauty of God (cf. 1 Cor 13:12) and will be able to read with joyful admiration the mystery of the universe, which will share with us endless fullness […]. Meanwhile, we unite to take care of this home entrusted to us, knowing that whatever good is in it will be taken up in the feast of heaven. Together with all creatures, we walk on this earth seeking God […] We walk singing!” (cf. Laudato Si’, 243-244).
Roberto Chiaramonte
Ángel Card. FERNÁNDEZ ARTIME 
P. Wirth MORAND