Living According to the Holy Spirit like Bl. Carlo Acutis, 28th Wednesday (II), October 12, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Napa Institute Principled Entrepreneurship Conference
Sheraton Times Square, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed Carlo Acutis
October 12, 2022
Gal 5:18-25, Ps 1, Lk 11:42-46

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we come to the end of our reading of St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians and he summarizes everything he’s been saying about the contrast between living thinking one is saved by the law and external deeds versus living to be saved by God through his grace received and responded to with faith. He does so in describing two totally divergent sets of effects. One he calls the “works of the flesh,” because this is what living focused on the “works of law” produces and is entirely the production of the individual; and the other is called the “fruit of the Spirit,” which like natural fruit is made requires the cooperation between the one who sows a seed (in this case, the Holy Spirit) and the one who receives it (in this case, us). The contrast couldn’t be greater. Often when we think of the “works of the flesh” we think first of those living under the three fold concupiscence of the lust of the eyes (materialism), lust of the flesh (carnal sensuality) and the pride of life (a desire for control and dominion). But St. Paul makes clear in context that living according to the works of the law, rather than in communion with the Legislator, can produce these same works of the flesh. He says that the works of the flesh are “obvious”: “immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like.” He says that those who do such things “will not inherit the kingdom of God,” not so much because they’ll be punished but because they won’t be interested in God’s kingdom after having made other things their god.
• Jesus pronounces a series of “woes” (indications of a cursed life) in the Gospel to those Scribes and Pharisees who, even though they thought they were living the way God wanted them to live were living ultimately according to the flesh. Unless they converted, he said, they’d be doomed, because while they were paying tithes on the smallest of garden herbs they were “pay[ing] no attention to judgment and to love for God.” They focus on the most conspicuous seats and the greetings of others, but are spiritually dead, “like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk.” To use the words of today’s Psalm, they’re ultimately like the “chaff that the wind drives away.” They impose burdens on others hard to carry without lifting a finger to help them, the exact opposite of a Good Samaritan. We see the works of the flesh in the way they attacked Jesus and others he had come to save. We see their idolatry of the law. We witness their immorality, hatred, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of anger, acts of selfishness and envy in the way they conspired to have Jesus framed and executed. We see their dissensions and factions in the discussions of the Sanhedrin, to which many of them belonged. On the outside they seemed to be doing the works of God, Jesus was saying, but on the inside they were just doing works of the flesh, refusing to enter the kingdom, and producing only chaff and interior death.
• St. Paul calls the Galatians and all of us Christians to another path. In the Psalm, it’s described as the way of the “blessed man” who “delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on His law day and night,” not as a dry document or as an idol but as a means of growing in love with the Lord who gives us the law to train us to love God and others. Such a person, the Psalm says, is “like a tree planted near running water that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves never fade.” That’s the person who plants himself in the Holy Spirit, “lives” in him, is “guided” by him,  and “follows” him. This cooperation with God’s grace in faith yields the type of fruit in every season that St. Paul describes: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” That fruit doesn’t happen as a coincidence; it flows from union with God. If we’re aware of God the Holy Spirit working within us, how can we not experience greater love for God and for all those God loves? How we can not experience the joy that is the infallible sign of God’s presence within, a joy that lasts even in the midst of suffering and contradiction, because how can anything compare with the happiness that flows from God’s presence? How can greater awareness and conscious following of God the Holy Spirit not increase our peace? How can it not help us with patience, for isn’t waiting for whatever we need to happen so much easier when we know we’re waiting consciously and prayerfully with God? How can the awareness of God within not make us more kind and gentle, seeking the other’s good together with the God who loves them and even correcting them out of love, knowing that the Holy Spirit will help us with the words? How can we not be more generous when the Holy Spirit has been generously poured into us as his temple? How can we not grow to trust God more in faith when he entrusts himself to us? How can it not help us with self-mastery over our lower appetites when the Holy Spirit strengthens — literally confirms — us within?
• Blessed Carlo Acutis is someone who showed us how to live according to the Holy Spirit and radiated the fruits of that life in a compelling way. He died 16 years ago today at 15 years of age. In his short span of life, however, Carlo became a teacher to his parents, peers, the poor and now the whole Church in true Christian spirituality, led by the Holy Spirit, and bore enormous fruit in his few years. When I first learned about him, I was impressed by his precocious hunger for God: he prayed the Rosary every day from a young age; made his first Holy Communion a year early and then attended daily Mass thereafter; cared for the homeless each night; traveled regularly to Assisi; loved the saints; learned computers to develop websites to spread his love of the Eucharist and Mary and to teach about angels and the four last things. I figured, frankly, that he must have come from a home similar to the one that produced, for example, Saint Therese. Instead he came from a home that, as his garrulous mother Antonia has humbly said in various interviews, wasn’t even lukewarm. By the time Carlo was born, Antonia had only been to Church three times in her life, the days she had been baptized, confirmed, and married. Carlo, through his questions and zeal, eventually got her to take her faith more seriously, and she was just one of many converts. While Carlo’s grandparents practiced the faith and he attended Catholic schools, it seems clear pretty clear that Lord interacted with Carlo much like he did the young prophet Samuel. Several things strike me about his life. He had an advanced awareness of the meaning of life and how to live well. “To be always united to Jesus is my program of life,” he declared. That’s what the Holy Spirit seeks to bring about. In contrast to contemporary narcissism, he said that happiness comes from keeping “one’s face turned toward God” and sadness from focusing your attention on yourself. “Not I, but God” was his mantra. “Find God,” he stated, “and you will find the meaning of your life.” He lived life with a certain urgency: “Every minute that passes,” he said, “is one minute less to become like God,” and to become like God was his desire. “What does it matter if you can win a thousand battles if you cannot win against your own corrupt passions?,” he asked. “The real battle is with ourselves.”Right before he died, he said, “To have a long life doesn’t mean that this is a good thing [because] one can live a very long time and live badly.” He humbly confessed, “I am happy to die because I have lived my life without waiting a minute on those things that do not please God.” The Holy Spirit helped him to stay focused on the things of the Spirit. He had an ardent love for Jesus in the Eucharist. He lived a Eucharistic life, calling the Eucharist “my highway to heaven.” He attended daily Mass from the time he was seven and spent time each day in adoration. “The more Eucharist we receive,” he believed, “the more we will become like Jesus.” He had a Eucharistic amazement, so fascinated by the Eucharistic miracles across the centuries that he went on adventure to try to visit them all and to document them so that others could share his astonishment. It didn’t make sense to him that there would be huge crowds for soccer games and rock concerts but no lines before the tabernacle where God is present and lives among us. He had a deep love for Mary, who shows us all like she showed the early Church in the Upper Room how to cooperated with the Holy Spirit. “The virgin Mary is the only woman in my life,” he said and called the Rosary, which he prayed daily, the “shortest ladder to climb to heaven” and the “most powerful weapon,” after the Eucharist, “to fight the devil.” Like his inspiring 196-part series on the Eucharistic miracles that has posthumously traveled the world, he also had conceptualized a 156-part series on the Marian apparitions completed by his mother after his death. The apparitions were signs of maternal care that actually the love of Mary seen in the Gospels. He had a vibrant charity. He stuck up for classmates being bullied, invited to his home kids who were suffering because of their parents’ divorce or domestic problems, tutored classmates who were struggling with homework or computer problems, patiently rescued friends experimenting with drugs or addicted to porn, spent time with the elderly helping them with tasks, “hunted” for litter in parks or on the beach to beautify the world, brought warm drinks and food to the homeless and used his allowance to buy them sleeping bags or warm clothes. “Life is a gift,” he said, “because as long as we are on earth, we can increase our level of love.” His greatest charity was to try to share the faith, about which he was zealous, not ashamed. From the time he was 11, he taught Catechism and sought to inspire younger kids to choose to strive for sanctity. To make the faith practical, he made a “Holiness Kit” for them that involved nine steps that he himself practiced: to love God with all your heart; each day to try to go to Mass and receive Communion, pray the Rosary, read a passage of Sacred Scripture, and make a visit to Jesus in the Tabernacle each day; to go to confession once a week; to help others as often as you can; and to rely on your guardian angel as your best friend. He attracted people to the faith more by his example and friendship than by words. His mom said, “To live close to someone like Carlo means not to remain neutral in your faith.” Carlo was an “influencer for God” not by his worldliness but by his ordinary other-worldly radicalness, based on life according to the Holy Spirit. His most famous quip was, “All people are born as originals, but many die as photocopies.” He wasn’t ashamed to be the original God had made and to help everyone else become not a photocopy but a living image of God through communion with Christ.
• Like we see in Blessed Carlo’s life, the first and greatest way we need to correspond to the Holy Spirit, to let him guide us, live in us so that we may follow him all the way to the Father’s house is here at Mass, where the Holy Spirit comes down to overshadow not just the priest and the altar to transform bread and wine entirely into God the Son in his body, blood, soul and divinity, but seeks to transform us into one body, one spirit of Christ. It’s here where we give him the permission to change us. It’s here where we encounter the source of our love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control and, like Blessed Carlo, are spurred on to holiness.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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