At the time of writing, Pope Francis at 88 is critically ill. On the hour news commentators report him rallying, slipping and improving by small and swinging increments. It seems like the end of an era, but who can tell?
In the wider world, something of a more frenetic teetering on the brink pervades these days, all blurred in a fog of uncertainty while (grown-up) people talk, negotiate, parry or thrust.
There is an intense contrast in the Gospel for the Roman Mass for February 25 – Mark 9:30-37, in which Jesus encounters his disciples squabbling about positions of power in his Kingdom and he sweeps up a child saying, “Anyone who welcomes one of these little children in my name, welcomes me.”
It was sobering to reread sections of the important work, The Way of the Lamb: The Spirit of Childhood and the End of the Age (1999), by the English priest-theologian, John Saward.
Saward writes, invoking the Scriptures and earlier writers Thérèse of Lisieux, G.K. Chesterton, Charles Péguy, Sigrid Undset and Georges Bernanos: “Reverence for the child is the gift of Christianity, the gift of Jesus Christ, to the world. It is part of the newness that, according to the Church Fathers, the divine Word incarnate brought into human history.”
(Sadly this book is no long in print, but its preface and postscript can be read here.)
Saward’s reflections on the propensity for pagan and secularised cultures to sacrifice their children to ideology, greed, survival and adult passions have lost none of their stinging rawness in the 21st century.
While child labour, material neglect and malnutrition are harder to find in the developed world, the experiments with “gender” surgery, the pornification of young lives, the desertification of childhood faith and intellect formation, and the hidden annihilation of the unborn sit alongside our now-crazed recognition in the West of subfertility, loneliness, the baby farming of surrogacy and “population winter”.
How else to explain the newly elected U.S. president’s order to expand IVF access across the United States, reportedly calling himself somewhat creepily the “Father of IVF”? President Trump said, “We want fertilisation and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF even more than them.”
The American bishops rightly pointed out that nearly all IVF “ends countless human lives and treats persons like property” and poses real health risks to the women who endure the strains of this technology. They urged the presidency to support ethical and more effective alternatives.
Saward’s book also reminds us that Christians throughout history have been at the forefront of the education and encouragement of the imaginations and intellects of children, because they believe both the world and Jesus Christ are especially available as truth, goodness and love to children whose sense of wonder provides a precious window for their growth in wisdom.
The Italian catechist and educator Sofia Cavalletti (1917-2011) has written: “An interpersonal relationship is always a mystery; it is more so when it involves a relationship with God; when the relationship is between God and the child the mystery is greater still.”
During our revival of the Thomas More Centre, we have invited our participants’ children to join in some suitable sessions and we have also run some small TMC Kids workshops. We have been struck by the depth and interest in the children’s response.
Blessed Carlo draws a crowd
As if to underscore that theme, last week I had the honour of speaking at a Parish Mission at St Thomas More Catholic Parish in Mount Eliza, Melbourne.
The Mission revolved around the veneration of the relics of the young millennial Blessed Carlo Acutis (1991-2006), whom Pope Francis has declared will be canonised as a saint during the Jubilee for Adolescents on April 20 this year.
At the core of the week-long Mission at Mount Eliza was Eucharistic Adoration, the Sacrament of Penance and Mass. Surrounding this was the opportunity to explore, in a contemplative way, a physical gallery that Carlo had begun in his website design: 150 Eucharistic miracles.
The Mission was organised by Fr Patrick Bradford, the Mount Eliza parish and Kate Hobbs, a busy mother from Queensland who has been taking the exhibition around Australia – as she says, “caught in Carlo’s net!”
Kate had witnessed some outstanding experiences taking the Carlo relics and exhibition to outback Catholic schools and down through Hobart.
My own talk was to a full church after Mass. We explored the life of Blessed Carlo and his remarkable ability as a young boy, born in London but brought up in Milan, to bring back to a lively church involvement his once-lukewarm parents and grandparents, the family’s Hindu male housekeeper, and numerous other people.
I called his life not only a “new evangelisation” but an evangelisation that runs back up the family tree and through the community. I wondered aloud if that might not be a pattern we will see in the Church more.
His mother, who is now a promoter of the boy’s example of sanctity, has pointed out how Carlo combined the “ordinariness” of his boyhood interests in computer programs and gaming, in playing soccer (which he was only ordinary at) and his boyish energy, with a truly heroic ability to convey the truths of the faith and the love of Christ.
Carlo has some very distinctive elements to his life – he had strong attachment to St Francis of Assisi, a special friendship for “guardian angels” and a profound love of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.
He would encourage his family to take him on pilgrimage there as often as possible. He also shared St Francis’ love of created nature but also followed with huge interest Pope Benedict XVI’s writings and thought on ecumenism and “integrated ecology”.
He would encourage the family to allow him to buy food and clothes for the homeless he met on his way home from school.
He could cite the Catechism of the Catholic Church verbatim and with creative ease. He himself became a catechist at the age of 12.
Antonia, his mother, discovered a wealth of “spiritual writings” on his computer after his short and intense suffering from acute leukemia, which ended his life at 15. Some of these reflections are profound and original. He offered his final days for Pope Benedict “and for the Church in order not to go through purgatory and to go straight to heaven”.
Carlo was always cheerful and radiant with lively joy but had said to his parents: “Often we live too frantically and do everything possible to forget that sooner or later we, too, will climb Golgotha. In fact, from birth, our earthly destiny is sealed because we are all invited to climb up Golgotha and take up our cross.”
It was impressive to see the patient and moved crowd at Mount Eliza. But there was something more in evidence.
At the end of the evening a boy about eight years old spoke to me of his love for Blessed Carlo – he had come with his mother and some extended family. They told me he had brought them back to Church and some into the catechumenate program at the parish.
Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre
