Friday, October 3 @ 7:00 PM
St. Augustine Cathedral

My dear sisters and brothers,

It was the first morning when we were in Assisi. I had the privilege to accompany most of our seminarians on retreat. A retreat led beautifully by Deacon Patou, one of our MCs. He invited us to walk in the footsteps of il poverello, Francis himself, in days of prayer and meditation.

I’m an early riser, so I was walking outside of our residenza there, probably halfway through Assisi, and it came upon a great surprise. For not 50 yards off to the corner, there is a church. And unbeknownst to me, in that church, there was a precious gift. So being nosy, I went to look. Church had just opened, and I was startled to see on the right-hand side the glass casket that held, blessed now Saint Carlo Acutus. A place where later in the day, there were literally hundreds and hundreds of people online.

That morning, there were three young women who sat in a pew contemplating what they were looking upon. A man of their relative same age, a man dressed in sports clothes, a young man who was like them in many ways, and yet a man who had found himself the Pearl of a great price, embracing a life of Holiness that now you and I acclaim him among the saints in the glory of heaven.

For me, it was a moving sight to see as I convicted myself that a young man at the age of 15 could achieve such radical Holiness that I, at 66, am still struggling to find. And yet there was another surprise in store. For later that day, I discovered the name of the church, Santa Maria Maggiore, and it was built for a particular reason.

It was not built for Carlo Acutus. It was built to commemorate the one place that Francis made famous by his extraordinary act of stripping himself naked, leaving behind his power and privilege, leaving behind his parents and all the patrimony and riches that were to be his. It was built on the very site where Francis disowned his father to claim the bishop as his new father, who left his earthly mother, to embrace a new mother, which was the church. To be able, as we say in Italian, spoliere, la spolazione, to literally strip himself of everything, to be naked, to be empty, so that he could be filled with the grace and the power that came from the one he met, one that came in the most likely places, in the person of a leper that Francis saw as he was returning from a seizing and realized that what the world considered ugly and to be outcast was Christ in his midst. And the rest of the story of Francis, we know, whose feast day we celebrate tomorrow.

And yet, my friends, perhaps there was no more fitting place to place the earthly remains of our first millennial saint than in that very church. For if you and I wonder in awe about how could someone so young achieve such Holiness, The answer perhaps is simpler than we first imagined. That Carlo, by grace and his own willingness, literally emptying himself so that he might find to himself, like Francis, the Pearl of Great Price.

For this was the young boy at seven years old that burned to receive Holy Communion and beg to receive it every day until he was able, in fact, to receive it. A young boy, from when he was very young, fell in love with the Lord and gave all of his life to him in his joy and struggles with his friends and relatives with his mother and father. He was not afraid to surrender everything. And of course, he loved his mother and father, but he loved them as they were gifts from the Lord to him. He was the one who brought them to conversion.

He loved his friends, but he was a companion to them, a light to them because of who burned inside of him. He loved technology and social media, but even that he gave up so that he would only spend certain amount of time every week so that he could spend the rest of the time in his week to be able to honor and glorify Christ. The time he spent online in social media was to glorify Christ in the Eucharistic miracles that he revealed to the entire world in all their completeness.

Of course, he loved the Eucharistic Lord. He called the Eucharist his highway to because he knew where he was going. He already understood the destination. He had come to know, love, and serve the Lord as his highest good. His greatest love and all the other loves in his life found their real purpose, their real place in Jesus. As Francis did, so did Carlo.

You and I come here tonight on this beautiful evening to ask for his intercession, to celebrate the fact that he is in our midst. Now he is our intercession and protector. We look to his example to follow. But may I suggest, my friends, that you and I here tonight will ask his prayers now, where he is in glory, that we might do what he did.

That you and I might find the courage ever more each day to empty our lives so that Jesus can give them back to us. To be able to fall in love with the one in whom we have our destiny, our hope, our joy, our peace, and our way to glory, that we could evermore purify ourselves as he did so that people will see in us a messenger of glad tidings and a road to the Lord himself.

My friends, we have work to do. I have work to do because the world needs more Carlos of Cutus’s in every community, in every home, in every school. You and I are called to that radical Holiness. Let us pray with his prayers, we may make progress in that one day at a time.

But allow me to end with this thought. We are all here because of one 15-year-old boy. There were hundreds of thousands of people at St. Peter’s with Peter himself. Because of one 15-year-old boy. And there will be countless generations to come unto the end of the ages that will see in him an example and a protector, an intercessors, all because of one 15-year-old boy who found the Pearl of Great Price by stripping himself of everything that didn’t matter.

Can you imagine, my friends, with his prayers and help and with the grace and power of the Holy spirit walking in the footsteps of Il Poverello, could you imagine what the world would be like if every single one of us in this church did the exact same thing? Saint Carlo Acutus, pray for us.