Eucharistic Awakenings

1. Carlo’s Parents were not practising, but had a basic faith; they had Carlo baptized.
2. Many fathers of the Church speak of the “natural desire for God” in the human being, and even to see the face of God. As we know, it gets suffocated by so many things in this life. In the baptized, like Carlo, this natural desire is enhanced, heightened by divine grace. This, too, sadly, can get suffocated.
3. Carlo would have followed so many today who fall away but for his Polish nanny, Beata. She had a lively faith, was practising, and had great devotion to JP2.
4. Children of 3-4 years begin to ask big questions about life. Carlo did the same to his mother and to Beata. Beata was first to take him to Mass and to speak of Holy Communion to Carlo. He accepted as a child does that what he was taught is true especially because it was Jesus who said, “this is my body.”
5. Before going to school even, Carlo pestered his mother to take him to see Jesus. These awakenings morphed into pestering and persistence and insistence. He would make the sign of the Cross in passing the church, possibly learning this from Beata or from the Irish or Scottish nannies he also had.
6. Such was the strength of his baptized desire to receive the Eucharist, he managed to convince everyone who mattered that he could receive it two years sooner than normal. He was a daily communicant by the age of seven.

We are disheartened by the number of parents who don’t practice and may not believe. We see the deleterious effect of that on children: no-one speaks to them about the things of God in direct, convincing and simple terms. Yet a child is constitutionally open to God, to faith, like Carlo. Carlo’s intensity of desire was probably unusual, a gift of Christ preparing him for his call to holiness, but the desire is still there and needs fed and educated by believing parents or godparents.

Eucharistic Engagement

1. By engagement, I mean Carlo’s participation in daily Mass and his adoration before and after Mass and at other times.
2. The Mother Superior of the monastery where Carlo received his first holy communion at age seven said that: “while Carlo was reverent during the Mass, as the time drew near for him to receive the Eucharist, he began to show signs of ‘impatience’ and he began to move as if he could no longer sit still. After receiving Jesus for the first time, it seemed that something had happened to him, only known to him, something so big that he could not contain.” From fidgeting, he entered a calm stillness, evident to all around him.
3. After the powerful experience of his first Communion, Carlo made a personal resolution to go to Mass every day. He would make the effort to wake up early and do whatever was needed to make it to Mass. In addition to bringing his parents along with him, he frequently invited others to join him as well. He said that “you go straight to heaven if you participate in the Mass each day.” And, boy, did he long to go straight to heaven! Another of his teachings is: “The more we receive the Eucharist, the more we will become like Jesus, so that on this earth we will have a foretaste of heaven.”
4. Carlo recognized that the soul who commits to daily Mass is brought daily closer and closer to heaven and to the gift of salvation. After receiving Jesus in the Eucharist each day, the simple prayer that Carlo would say was “Jesus, come right in! Make yourself at home!” This humble prayer to Jesus as a close friend shows us the simplicity of eucharistic faith.
5. Pope St. John Paul II refers to the “Eucharistic amazement” we should both ask for from God and seek to develop in ourselves. For Carlo, that amazement grew through the practice of eucharistic adoration. Before or after Mass, Carlo would spend long periods of time adoring Jesus in the Eucharist. He would make a point to attend eucharistic adoration two to three times each week to speak simply to Jesus about the desires of his heart.
6. Carlo realised that it is the Eucharist which draws out of us the true original person we are meant to be. He would see many around him try to be their own individual selves, but without their noticing it, most, if not all, were simply just following the crowd, being just like everyone else. That’s where his little teaching came from, “everyone is born original, but most die as photocopies.” Maybe I could adapt another of his phrases: the Eucharist is not only the highway to heaven but also the highway to being your true, original self.
7. Being the original person God wants you to be is really just another way of talking about personal holiness. Another little Eucharistic teaching of Carlo is that “people who stand before the sun get a tan, but people who stand before the Eucharist get holiness.” The Eucharistic wisdom of Carlo was not learnt from books, but from living a Eucharistic life.
8. Carlo’s engagement with the Eucharist also led him to see that devotion to it and to the Sacred Heart are one and the same thing. He had a great devotion to St. John, the Beloved Disciple, because he leaned on the heart of Jesus at the Last Supper. For Carlo, this was an act of Eucharistic adoration.

Carlo’s engagement with the Eucharist both in the devout participation in daily Mass and in frequent adoration, both before and after Mass, as well as 2-3 other times in the week, beckons us to consider a number of things. People today talk a lot about hygiene: sleep hygiene, dental hygiene, food hygiene. What is my Eucharistic hygiene? For example, prayerful preparation for Mass and Communion at home or in the church. What quality of time do I give to thanksgiving afterwards? Is the atmosphere in the church before and after Mass conducive to prayer? If not, what can we each do to improve that, and what can we do as a community? Do I have any kind of commitment to Eucharistic devotion outside of Mass, whether the Blessed Sacrament is exposed or not? Carlo did whatever he could to arrange things so that the Eucharist came first and his own convenience and routines came second. I know myself how easy it is to say to myself, “oh, I have to do this, or must do that” which is sometimes true, but other times it’s not actually so necessary. We must all consider these things for ourselves, of course, but maybe Carlo invites us to give the benefit of the doubt to the Eucharist, to arrange or rearrange things to give priority to the Eucharist.

Eucharistic Action

1. The real test and therefore proof of the authenticity of Carlo’s Eucharistic life was the fact that he lived out the Agape love, the self-sacrificing love, of the Eucharist in loving action in favour of others.
2. He befriended everyone and anyone, from schoolmates, to the down and out, to the immigrants, to the door-keepers, to those he met of whatever state in life. He defended the underdog and literally put his money where his mouth was, spending his allowance on caring for the needy and poor around him, and depriving himself of excess and extra even in his own personal clothing, food and comfort.
3. The Eucharist was a veritable engine of charity and action which impelled him to teach younger children the faith and give witness to the teaching of the church among his peers even at the cost of ridicule.
4. Because he wanted everyone to know and share his own love for the Eucharist he went to extraordinary measures to teach himself computer science so that he could build a website that would provide the scientific evidence for Eucharistic miracles.
5. Even in the face of death, he imitated the Eucharistic Christ in offering his sufferings and death for others, for the Church and for the Pope. All of his short and intense life revolved around the Eucharist, was lived for it and from its power. Most of us take the long, winding road to eternity, but Carlo most certainly took the most direct and fastest highway, or rather, he let Christ take him on that highway. If I may dare to say this: if I were Christ, why wouldn’t I want to bring this boy home to me a.s.a.p., both because of the intensity of my love for him, and because of the enormity of the work I have in store for him to do in interceding for mankind?

So, Lord, in your presence, we ask you to hear Carlo’s prayers for our parish in this time of Festival in honour of your Mother, for the children and the sick, for the lapsed and the lost, for the married and the single, for the confused and the despairing, for the hard of heart and for the broken-hearted. Send Carlo to lead us more deeply into your Holy Eucharist, to revive our awakenings, our engagement and our action. By your grace, banish all that in us is mere photocopy and restore us through holiness to be the original images of yourself which you created and redeemed us to be.