Not Ashamed of the Gospel, Like Blessed Carlo Acutis, 28th Tuesday (I), October 12, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Blessed Carlo Acutis
October 12, 2021
Rom 1:16-25, Ps 19, Lk 11:37-41

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted during the homily:

• “I am not ashamed of the Gospel,” St. Paul emphatically tells the Romans at the beginning of today’s epistle. Those are very strong words for someone who, at a human level, might have had many reasons to be shamefaced and silent about the Gospel. After all, he was scourged, beaten with rods stoned, shipwrecked, ambushed, hunted down and imprisoned on account of the Gospel. He was crisscrossing the globe to preach preposterously that a publicly executed carpenter from an obscure village not only had risen the dead and was alive but was also the Lord and Son of God. Jesus’ crucifixion, he knew, was a laughing stock for Greeks and an embarrassing scandal for Jews. But despite it all he stressed that he was not ashamed of the Gospel, in all its paradoxical details, because he knew that, however improbable it might seem to human wisdom, it was in fact the power and wisdom of God.
• It’s important that we confront and with God’s grace overcome any embarrassment we have over our faith. There are many in the Church who are ashamed of the Gospel. In the context of an aggressive secularism that is pushing hedonism, materialism, individualism, and rationalistic empiricism, and often mocks Church teaching as the morality of unenlightened, antediluvian cavemen, many feel somewhat humiliated to give witness to their Catholic faith. Many Catholics have been made to feel that the Gospel is not only “bad news,” but on occasion even ridiculous. Catholics after all believe that we adore and eat God himself in Holy Communion, even though to the world all we’re doing is consuming cheap bread and wine. We believe, according to Jesus’ own words, that the path of happiness is spiritual poverty instead of riches, purity instead of sexual profligacy, spiritual hunger instead of satiety, meekness instead of strength, and persecution instead of popularity. We believe in praying for persecutors, forgiving those who hate us seventy times seven times, and turning the other cheek. We believe that we shouldn’t commit even the slightest sin even if we were able to win the whole world. And then we get to the really controversial issues for people today! We believe that the Pope is infallible — he cannot make a mistake, ever — on something that he teaches to be definitively held by all the faithful on something we need to believe (faith) or do (morals) to please God and enter into his life. We believe that even though men and women are equal in dignity before God, only men are capable of being ordained priests.We believe that no one should morally be able to take the life of the unwanted child growing within her through abortion. We believe that everyone should remain chaste and sexually abstinent until marriage, and that all sex outside of marriage is sinful. We believe that even though almost everyone, including Catholic married couples, use some form of contraception at some point in their marriages, it is still wrong. We profess to love those with same-sex attractions while at the same time saying that they should never, ever act on those attractions by engaging in same-sex sexual activity. Contrary to gender ideology, we believe that God made us male and female in his image and that is part of his plan. These are among the issues that make many members of Christ’s flock sheepish with regard to living and sharing the faith. It’s often some priests, religious and Catholics professionally involved in education that are among the most ashamed. One of the great dramas taking place in the Church today, I’m convinced, is about whether we’re ashamed of Jesus’ teaching about the indissolubility of marriage or whether we think it’s part of the truth that sets people free, part of the Gospel that, although hard to live in circumstances, is meant to bring us to God and fill us with joy.
• St. Paul was not ashamed of the Gospel and his example is an inspiration to all Catholics. After describing his holy pride and confidence in the Gospel that is the “power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes,” he went on to tackle straight on many of the contemporary ideas that made those in Rome consider the faith farcical. He dissected the “impiety and wickedness” found in those who deny God even though creation would make no sense without a creator anymore than a wooden chair would make sense without a carpenter. He described the foolishness of pagan worship, which exchanges God’s glory to adore statues of birds, snakes or savage quadrupeds. He mentioned the slavery of those who gave in through the lust of their hearts for the “mutual degradation of their bodies,” worshipping the creature instead of the Creator. In all of these cases, as G.K. Chesterton once quipped, “When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”
• Jesus himself sought to teach us by his own example how not to be ashamed of the Gospel. In the midst of an encounter in which his Pharisaical host wanted to make him feel guilty for not having washed his hands, Jesus used it as an example to teach us about how to cleanse our insides, by giving of ourselves totally to living the Gospel as generously as Jesus did. He says that we become pure on the inside by almsgiving, which means not just giving a quarter to a poor person or a quarter of a million to the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, but by giving of ourselves in love to God and others. It means like St. Paul giving ourselves together with the Gospel and not being ashamed of doing either, even if no one else is doing so. The path to purity of heart, to cleaning our insides, is a truly Eucharistic life in which we receive Jesus’ total self-gift and say, in return, this is my body, my blood, my sweat, my flesh given out of love for you.
• Today we celebrate a saint who was not ashamed of the Gospel either and whose whole life precociously became a Eucharistic alms in imitation of Christ. Blessed Carlo Acutis died 15 years ago today at 15 years of age. In his short span of life, however, and in the midst of many who were embarrassed about the Gospel and particularly the teaching of the Holy Eucharist, Carlo became a teacher to his parents, peers, the poor and now the whole Church. 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. 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.” 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. “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 love for the Church and the saints. “To criticize the Church means to criticize ourselves,” he said, because “the Church is the dispenser of treasures for our salvation.” We judge the Church not by those who don’t live according to her teachings but by those who do, which is why he drew near to the saints, like Saint Francis of Assisi and various great young saints like Tarcisius, Aloysius, Dominic Savio, Bernadette, and Francisco and Jacinta Marto. 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.” His zeal led him use his computer skills to try to design websites not only on the Eucharist and on Marian apparitions but also a 170-part series on the Last Things and a 131-part series on Angels and Demons in the lives of saints. Carlo was an “influencer for God” not by his worldliness but by his ordinary other-worldly radicalness. 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.
• Today as we prepare to receive Jesus in the Eucharist, we ask through Blessed Carlo’s intercession and St. Paul’s that, like them, we may unabashedly always view the entirety of the Gospel Jesus has announced to us as the truth that will set us free, as the Good News that the world always needs, even if it doesn’t realize it.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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