Dear Friends,
As you look around this weekend, we are obviously celebrating the Santa Lucia Festival. During these days we celebrate the faith of a young woman who gave witness to the faith through her life and her death. Historians estimate that Lucy was either 20 or 21 when she was martyred. Young. Her life was so short. Yet her life serves as a witness to others of how to follow Jesus, how to truly be a disciple.
In just over a month, Pope Leo will canonize two more young people as Saints in the Catholic Church. Like Lucy, they were both quite young when they died but have inspired millions of people through their witness of faith.
Carlo Acutis, born in England to an Italian family, died of leukemia in 2006 at the age of fifteen. He is known for his great devotion to the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Carlo called the Eucharist “my highway to heaven,” and he did all in his power to make the real presence known. His witness inspired his parents to return to practicing the Catholic faith and his Hindu au pair to convert and be baptized. Many of Carlo’s classmates, friends, and family members testified to the Vatican how he brought them closer to God. He is remembered for saying, “People who place themselves before the sun get a tan; people who place themselves before the Eucharist become saints.”
In 2020 he became the first millennial to be beatified by the Catholic Church and is widely popular among young people. Known for his deep faith and digital savvy, he used his computer-coding skills to draw attention to Eucharistic miracles around the world. His miracles’ exhibit, featuring more than one hundred documented miracles involving the Eucharist throughout history, has traveled to thousands of parishes across five continents.
Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died from polio at the age of 24 in 1925, is also beloved by many today for his enthusiastic witness to holiness that reaches “to the heights.” The young man from the Italian city of Turin was an avid mountaineer known for his charitable outreach. At the age of 17, he joined the St. Vincent de Paul Society and dedicated much of his spare time to taking care of the poor, the homeless, and the sick as well as demobilized servicemen returning from World War I. John Paul II, who beatified Frassati in 1990, called him a “man of the eight beatitudes,” describing him as “entirely immersed in the mystery of God and totally dedicated to the constant service of his neighbor.” On the photo of one of his last mountain-climbing trips he wrote “to the heights” which has become a kind of battle cry to those who have followed his example in loving God and neighbor. When he died his parents expected the church to be full of their wealthy and influential friends, but it was packed with the poor people he had helped so much in his brief life.
You will hear more about these two new young saints in the next few weeks. May they, like St. Lucy, inspire you, at any age, to become more like Jesus.
Peace,
Fr. Damian