Among the many wonderful saint-friends with October feasts, Bl. Carlo Acutis (October 12) immediately stands out for his contemporaneity and youth. Blessed Carlo died of leukemia at age 15 in 2006. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that he speaks only – or even primarily – to the very young, for his life continues to bear astonishing fruit: not only in the website he created to document Eucharistic miracles throughout the world, but also in the witness of suffering love by which he offered up his illness for the Church.
These two gifts, moreover, are not separate sides of a vocation, much less competing visions of Blessed Carlo’s life. Rather, offering his suffering for the Church was itself a way of living out the Eucharistic nature of our call as Christians, to which he attests so joyfully in his curatorial work online. In fact, through it he gives us renewed insight into what it means to be a Eucharistic people.
The source of this eucharistic identity is of course Christ Himself, present to us – Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity – in the Blessed Sacrament. He feeds us in this glorious mystery of self-gift, thus drawing us into His blessed, Trinitarian life and inviting us to become more fully the Body of Christ, the Church.
Yet it’s only recently that I’ve begun to hear this transformative call in the Eucharistic prayer itself. At the Consecration, before the priest raises the Precious Blood, he speaks Christ’s words: “Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.” I am used to hearing “do this in memory of me” as simply (though profoundly) a call to participation at the altar in the celebration of Mass. And while certainly this is an essential reality, I’ve begun to hear in it also a call to act meaningfully as members of the Body of Christ in the world.
The Blood of Christ is “poured out for [us] and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” When we receive Christ Himself in the Blessed Sacrament, we encounter Him in a personal and intimate way, but we also embrace His Love as an active call in our own lives: to pour ourselves out in sacrifice for others as He pours Himself out for us. Being a Eucharistic people, fed with Christ’s own life, we also participate in His outpouring Love.
When Carlo Acutis offered up his suffering, his cross, for the Church, this was a profoundly Eucharistic act, uniting him in love to Christ’s own sacrifice. Mother Teresa used to tell her community, “Let… the poor eat you up. In the Eucharist Jesus makes Himself the Bread of Life that I may eat Him. In the poor He makes Himself the hungry one that I may feed Him.” In the same sense, Christ invites us to join Him in giving of ourselves to serve and nourish our brothers and sisters.
This weekend, the last in October, as we prepare for all the energy and chaos of the next two months, let’s ask for the grace both to remain close to Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and also to live out His compassion and generosity in our own lives by embodying His sacrificial love in whatever way He might be calling us to give. May we be (small “s”) sacraments of God’s grace in the lives of those around us.
