25th Sunday, Year C (Gospel: Luke 16:1-13) Justice or revenge?

 

When terrible crimes have been committed, like the assassination of Charlie Kirk and all the appalling shootings of the children in schools, there is always a lot of talk about the killers and how they should be dealt with: life in prison, the death sentence? When we are outraged by some terrible crime, it is normal to want to lash out and seek revenge. We should always seek justice, but that often becomes revenge, rather than justice.

 

In the Old Testament, from the law given to Moses, it says, ‘Whoever takes a human life, shall surely be put to death… an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth…whatever injury a man has given a person, shall be given to him.’ (Lev 24:17, 20, 21). That may seem like a call for revenge, but it is actually calling for a proportionate response, as opposed to revenge.

 

Then Jesus quotes that same law and takes it to a deeper level. He said, ‘You have heard how it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ but I say to you not to resist an evil person. If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.’

 

Jesus is bringing that teaching to a deeper level, calling for mercy.

 

There is a friend of mine in Ireland who is a paramedic. One of the calls that he got was to a house where there had been a domestic dispute between a husband and wife. Something had happened and the father had snapped. He ended up stabbing his wife and accidentally killing his nine-year-old daughter. My friend didn’t realize what he was being called to and then found himself faced with a nine-year-old bleeding to death. She died from her injuries. That is the kind of scene that you never forget. When he was telling me about it he said, ‘That man should never be forgiven.’ I could understand his anger.

 

There is another perspective to it that we don’t usually think about. We usually think of someone’s death as being the end, their life is over. However, from a faith point of view, their life on earth is over, but now they have gone on to what we call heaven, where they are no longer suffering, but experiencing a joy that we have never had. Presuming they are in heaven, I wonder what the person killed would say. Would they demand justice, or revenge, or mercy?

 

I want to share with you the life of one of the youngest saints, Maria Goretti, which speaks for itself and can make us think differently.

 

St. Maria Goretti was born in Corinaldo, Italy, in 1890. She died just before her 12^th birthday, in 1902. Her family were farmers, but her father died when she was young and so they ended up selling the farm and working as farm hands. Eventually they had to share a house with another family, the Serenellis, a father and two sons. The sons were into bad living and one of them, Alessandro, continually tried to seduce Maria. He tried to rape her twice, but she wouldn’t give in to him. Maria normally stayed at the house during the day, taking care of the younger children.

 

One day Alessandro arranged that he would be on his own with her in the house and he then tried to rape her. She refused and wouldn’t give in to him. She kept shouting that it was a sin and would offend God and that he could go to hell for it. In a fit of rage he stabbed her fourteen times and then fled the scene.

 

When Maria was found she was rushed to hospital but died two days later from her injuries. The surgeons were unable to give her anaesthesia as her body was too weak. During the surgery she woke up and told her mother what had happened and that Alessandro had tried to rape her two other times as well, but she was afraid to mention it as he had threatened to kill her if she did. While she was awake she also said that she forgave Alessandro and wanted him to go to heaven too. She died the next day from her wounds.

 

When the locals found out what had happened they tried to get Alessandro and would have killed him, but the police got there first. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

 

The only known photograph of St. Maria Goretti

Initially when Alessandro was imprisoned, he was unrepentant and bragged about what he had done. However, several years later she appeared to him in a dream and gave him fourteen lilies. As he took each one it burned his fingers and disappeared. He realized that each flower represented each of the times that he had stabbed her and that she had forgiven him. From then on his life changed completely. He became deeply repentant and changed his behavior so much, that he was eventually let out of jail early (after 27 years) because of his exemplary behaviour.

 

After he was released he went to Maria’s mother Assunta and begged her forgiveness. He explained how she had come to him in a dream and had forgiven him. His mother said to him, ‘If Maria can forgive you, then I must forgive you too.’ They ended up going to mass and receiving Communion together on Christmas Eve.

 

Alessandro spent the rest of his life working as a layman in a Capuchin monastery as a receptionist and gardener.

 

Maria was canonised in 1950 and her mother and some of her siblings were present.

 

God is perfectly just and infinitely merciful. Even if people escape justice on earth, they will always be held accountable before God as we all will be. But God is also infinitely merciful, in a way that is hard for us to understand. That is one of the reasons why the Church teaches against the death penalty, as people can change, but being merciful doesn’t mean there is no justice.

 

'When they came to the place called the skull, they crucified him there along with two criminals… Jesus said, “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”'

The Exaltation of the Cross (Gospel: John 3:13-17) God so loved the world that He gave his only Son.

 

Over the last few days I have met so many people who are so stressed and angry and even feeling hatred, because of the terrible events of the last few days. Almost everyone who came to confession expressed this.

We should be outraged at the assassination of Charlie Kirk and all these horrific school shootings and we should always work for justice whatever way we can and try to end all the gun violence. But then there comes a point where we need to decide where we will go next. If we immerse ourselves in all the social media and all the opinions, many of which are so toxic and so hateful, then we will become full of anger and hatred ourselves, which is exactly what the devil wants. He wants to get everyone to hate everyone else, to turn all of us against each other.

We can also turn to Jesus and the things of God and then we will become filled with light and we will be light in the darkness which is all around us. Our country and world doesn't need more people filled with hatred. It needs people filled with hope and who bring the light of Christ everywhere. Our faith gives us that hope and we need to bring that into our world. Turning to Jesus is not being naive about what is going on. I read and watch everything, but there comes a point where I need to turn away from the hatred that follows. Our country doesn't need more hate-filled people. It needs hope and faith-filled people. 

One of the summer jobs I had as a student was working in a car factory in Germany. There were a lot of Irish students working there. One of the other guys there—knowing that I was into my faith—said to me once, ‘That whole idea of being lost and saved is a load of rubbish,’ or words to that effect. I understood what he meant, but at the same time I believed that he was mistaken. ‘It’s probably a phrase that you associate with some of the charismatic tv evangelists who often talking about being saved. A lot of the problem comes down to language. Much of the language we use with regards to our faith sounds out of date, and as a result it is easy to think that faith is just something from an age gone by.

 

So if there is such a thing as being ‘lost’ or ‘saved’, what does this mean? What are we saved from, if we are saved? All through his teachings, Jesus, the Son of God, frequently mentions the need to choose for God. There is a choice to be made and that choice must be made by each person individually. No one can make that choice for anyone else, even if we want to. We are told that if we choose for God we are ‘saved,’ but what does this mean? It means we are saved from losing God forever. We are choosing the only thing that makes sense of what our life is about; that is, God. We are created by God and for God, created to be with God and that is the only place we will find happiness. If we choose God, we are saved from losing that possibility of the happiness we long for.

 

To be lost means to lose all that God offers us and consequently to lose what God wants to give us: happiness, fulfilment and being with our loved ones again. It is not just a religious notion; it is real and Jesus tells us again in this Gospel passage, that the whole purpose of his life, death and resurrection, was to save us, to save us from being separated from God forever. So the idea of being lost or saved is very real and it is a choice that we must make.

 

The title of this feast that we celebrate—the Triumph of the Cross—is a contradiction in itself. To be crucified in ancient times, was the ultimate mark of failure. They understood that anyone who died this way, was cursed by God. That was one of the reasons why they wanted Jesus killed by crucifixion specifically, since this would ‘prove’ that he was not God. It says in Deuteronomy (21:22) ‘Cursed be the man who hangs on a tree.’ And even when you look at the symbol of any cross, what could be more of a failure than this: total public humiliation, total helplessness, and death. Yet the bizarre thing is that through this event, through this terrible suffering and miscarriage of justice, everything changed. Through what seemed the ultimate act of human failure God brought about the greatest act of mercy for his people. The crucifixion is the bridge between God and humanity, lost through Original Sin, but now restored again through Jesus. That is why the cross is such an important symbol for us. That is also why the demons hate the symbol of the crucifix. It is also why we should have blessed crucifixes in our homes and wear them if possible.

 

Probably the greatest problem that any of us face is the problem of suffering: sickness and the death of people we love; injustice carried out against the innocent. We rebel against this, we get angry and we cry out to God, ‘How can you allow this to happen?’ Often during times of the greatest distress, God seems to stay infuriatingly silent. We want an answer to help us make sense of what is happening, but there does not seem to be any answer. And yet there is an answer that God gives us, though perhaps it is not the answer that we want to hear. God points us to the cross and reminds us that He allowed Jesus—the completely innocent one—to suffer the most horrific and shameful death. It reminds us that even though we do not understand suffering, that it does have a purpose and that God will make sense of it for us in the end and even more importantly that God can bring the greatest good out of situations of suffering. That is why when we are suffering we come and pray before the cross. We unite our suffering to his suffering. He understands our suffering because He has also experienced it. We ask God to help us not to despair, but to trust that everything will make sense in the end.

 

When we encounter the death of loved ones, especially in a way that is not natural, through violence, or when a person is young, we ask, ‘Where is God now? How could God allow this to happen?’ Yet, if you look at the crucifixion, I’m sure many people there said the same thing. ‘Where is God now? How could God allow such a man to be crucified?’ And yet God was there in the heart of it. It was that act of suffering that reopened the possibility of eternal life for us. To accept that is to be saved. To reject that is to be lost. That’s why it is so important that we pray for people who have lost their way in the world, turned their back on God by the way they are living.

 

The mercy of God is infinite and something we can’t grasp. The saint and mystic known as Padre Pio (1887-1968), said that if God’s mercy was only what we think it is, then we would all end up in hell. In other words, we have such a small and limited idea of that mercy. Jesus went to the ends of the earth, to make it possible to get to heaven when we die. If that is true, then what is there to be afraid of, so long as we make an effort to repent of our sinfulness. Getting to heaven does not depend on us becoming holy enough, rather on us abandoning ourselves to God’s mercy. What matters is that we try to live as God asks us to. Effort is what matters.

 

So often people come to me, afraid that God will not forgive them because of things they have done. Yet, the whole purpose of the sacrifice of Christ was to forgive those very things that we are ashamed of and which cause us to be afraid of losing heaven, being lost. It also implies that we are thinking we must merit heaven, in some way; be good enough for heaven.

 

‘It is owing to his favor that salvation is yours through faith. This is not your own doing, it is God’s gift. Neither is it a reward for anything you have accomplished, so let no one pride himself on it. (Eph 2:8-9)

 

This is a reminder again that it doesn’t depend on us being good enough, since we can’t be, but accepting this gift that God offers us, the gift of eternal life. That is what God gave us in the first place and still wants for us.

 

Imagine that you went to great lengths to get an incredible gift for someone you love. You want them to receive that gift. You want them to realize what an incredible gift it is, so that it will bring them all the more happiness. You would hate for them not to receive it, since you went to such lengths to get it for them. That is what God’s giving us eternal life is about. God wants us to have this gift and it is a gift. God offers us that gift of eternal life with him. We just have to accept it and we accept it by the choices we make throughout our life.

 

Imagine if eternal life was not real? How would we face the death of our loved ones. But this gift is what gives us such great hope. We can be with our loved ones again if we choose for God.

 

Jesus also said there is one sin which is unforgivable. ‘Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.’ (Matt 12:21). What does that mean? The Holy Spirit is the love between God the Father and the Son. To blaspheme against the love of God is to reject it, which is to reject God. If we curse God and reject God, we have lost God, because God will never force us to love him. That doesn’t come down to one time saying something that is blasphemous. It is a continual state of mind that rejects, or curses God.

 

Christianity is probably the only religion that does not try to escape, or avoid suffering. God tells us that through suffering we are transformed. It is part of our journey to heaven, even though none of us want it. It is part of what forms us as human beings. You have probably encountered people who have suffered a lot, they are often the most compassionate.

 

No one wants to have to face the cross, but it also has its place. It is part of our path to heaven. 

‘It is owing to his favor that salvation is yours through faith. This is not your own doing, it is God’s gift. Neither is it a reward for anything you have accomplished, so let no one pride himself on it. (Eph 2:8-9)

23rd Sunday, Year C (Gospel: Luke 14:25-33) St. Carlo Acutis - world wide saint

St. Carlo Acutis (May 3, 91 - Oct 12, 2006)

All down through the ages, God continually raises up holy men and women to inspire others and help them come closer to him. Different saints often have different charisms, which are particularly suited to their time. One such saint is Carlo Acutis who is being canonized a saint this Sunday Sept, 6^th, 2025, along with Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died at the age of 24.

I just want to share with you a little of the life of Carlo Acutis as his life is so much part of our time.

Blessed Carlo Acutis was born on May 3, 1991, in London, England, into a wealthy Italian business family to Andrea Acutis and Antonia Salzano, members of wealthy Italian families. His father's family worked in the Italian insurance industry and his mother's ran a publishing company. They moved to Italy soon after his birth and he was cared for by Irish and Polish nannies.

Acutis’ mother, Antonia, says she doesn’t know how he came to love Jesus. He had been baptized as a baby, but the family didn’t practice the faith. Perhaps it was their Polish nanny who told Carlo about Jesus. Regardless of the source, Carlo had a deep love for Jesus even as a preschooler, asking his bemused mother if they could stop in to see Jesus when they walked past churches in their Milan neighborhood — and even insisting on taking flowers to place at the feet of the Blessed Mother.

Antonia wasn’t sure what to do with this piety in her young son, and she wasn’t prepared to answer his many questions. But as he asked, she began to wonder as well. His curiosity eventually prompted her to take theology classes; beyond just being back at Mass, Antonia was diving into her faith, and all because of Carlo. “He was like a little savior for me,” she said in an interview published in 2019.

Carlo’s longing for the Eucharist drove him to ask permission to receive earlier than was customary. At 7, Carlo received his first Communion and never missed Mass again. Not just Sunday Mass, either. Every day of his life, Carlo went to Mass. Every day, he stole a few minutes to pray in silence before the tabernacle. And while his parents sometimes went with him, Carlo often went alone. When they traveled, Carlo’s first order of business was to find a church and figure out Mass times. Whether or not his parents joined him, Carlo would be there. Every day.

And they traveled quite a bit. Carlo’s deep love of Mary (whom he called “the only woman in my life”) led the family to Marian apparition sites all over Europe. But their pilgrimages became more intentional when Carlo was 11 and got an idea.

After receiving his first Communion, Carlo had begun to lament the many, many people who don’t go to Mass. “They’ll stand in line for hours to go to a concert,” he would say, “but won’t stay even a moment before the tabernacle.” Eager to do something to draw souls to Jesus, young Carlo began to research Eucharistic miracles.

He was convinced that people wouldn’t be able to stay away from the holy Mass if they knew about the miracles of Lanciano and Poznan and the dozens of others recognized by the church. So Carlo began to research, dragging his parents from one shrine to another in order to take pictures for the website he was building.

Born the year of the launch of the worldwide web, Carlo was also something of a child prodigy when it came to computer skills. He was able to read and write at the age of 4. By age 9 he was reading books meant for the faculty of computer engineers at the University of Milan, referred to as La Statale, which is a renowned research facility.  His mother said he knew the importance of the internet from the beginning, not for a career purpose for himself, but for the importance of the evangelization of his faith.

He was asked to set up a web page for his parish and in high school began to set up a website on the cataloging of Eucharist Miracles and Marian Apparitions used by the Vatican. He launched it in 2004 and worked on it for two and a half years. He created a portable display along with the website cataloging 187 Eucharistic Miracles.

For all his technological skills, Carlo was a friendly, outgoing kid. He was so friendly that his family was reluctant to go on walks with him; Carlo knew everybody, it seemed and couldn’t help but stop to talk to every person he passed. He had a sensitive heart and was always looking out for those who were suffering: classmates whose parents were going through a divorce, kids who were being bullied.

Carlo’s approach was always friendship. And through that friendship, people were always drawn to Jesus. As pure and as pious as he was, nobody felt judged by the young saint. His uncle says that being with Carlo filled your heart and that joy left people seeking and wondering, as Carlo’s mother had years before. A young Hindu man who worked for Carlo’s family was baptized as a direct result of his friendship with Carlo, while many others returned to the faith.

Carlo was particularly close to the homeless people in his neighborhood, packing up food most days to take out to his friends on the street. Though his family was wealthy, Carlo had no patience for excess. He saved up his pocket money to buy a sleeping bag for a homeless friend, and when his mother suggested they buy Carlo such “luxuries” as a second pair of shoes, he revolted. Technology, though, wasn’t a luxury. It was an important part of his apostolate, and Carlo had no qualms about using three computers when building his website.

Through all this, every day: mass, the rosary, silent time before the tabernacle. Carlo insisted that holiness was impossible otherwise. “The Eucharist is my highway to heaven,” he would say, and nothing could get between him and his daily appointment with the Lord. “The more we receive the Eucharist, the more we will become like Jesus,” Carlo said.

How did he have the time? In between teaching himself computer skills, playing soccer, riding his bike around Milan to visit the poor, teaching himself the saxophone, patiently explaining technology to his older relatives and making one movie after another? According to his mother, Carlo didn’t waste time on useless things. He limited himself to an hour a week of video games (because, he said, he didn’t want to become a slave to them) and focused the rest of his time on things that were valuable. But that didn’t exclude silly animations or videos of his dogs — Carlo knew that something doesn’t need to be catechetical to be valuable, and he enjoyed leisure all the more because its greatest value was in being fun.

Carlo hungered for heaven. “We have always been awaited in heaven,” he said, and throughout his life his eyes were fixed on eternity. So when, at 15, he went to the hospital with the flu and was diagnosed instead with an acute and untreatable leukemia, Carlo wasn’t upset. He was ready to go home. “I can die happy,” he told his mother, “because I haven’t wasted even a minute on things that aren’t pleasing to God.”

Within three days, Carlo Acutis was dead.

He was a remarkable young man, but he was an ordinary man. He had no visions. He didn’t levitate when he prayed. He just lived like heaven was real. He was completely himself, video games and computer programming and all, but entirely Christ’s.

 

Two Miracles

Part of the process of being made a saint, is to have two miracles attributed to the intercession of that person. The first miracle involved a boy from Brazil named Mattheus being healed from a serious birth defect called an annular pancreas after he and his mother asked Acutis to pray for his healing.

Mattheus was born in 2009 with a serious condition that caused him difficulty eating and serious abdominal pain. He was unable to keep any food in his stomach and vomited constantly.

By the time Mattheus was nearly four years old, he weighed only 20 pounds, and lived on a vitamin and protein shake, one of the few things his body could tolerate. He was not expected to live long.

His mother, Luciana Vianna, had spent years praying for his healing.

At the same time, a priest friend of the family, Fr. Marcelo Tenorio, learned online about the life of Carlo Acutis, and began praying for his beatification. In 2013 he obtained a relic from Carlo’s mother, and he invited Catholics to a Mass and prayer service in his parish, encouraging them to ask Acutis’ intercession for whatever healing they might need.

Mattheus’ mother heard about the prayer service. She decided she would ask Acutis to intercede for her son. In fact, in the days before the prayer service, Vianna made a novena for Acutis’ intercession, and explained to her son that they could ask Acutis to pray for his healing.

On the day of the prayer service, she took Mattheus and other family members to the parish.

Fr. Nicola Gori, the priest responsible for promoting Acutis’ sainthood cause, told Italian media what happened next:

“On October 12, 2013, seven years after Carlo’s death, a child, affected by a congenital malformation (annular pancreas), when it was his turn to touch the picture of the future blessed, expressed a singular wish, like a prayer: ‘I wish I could stop vomiting so much.’ Healing began immediately, to the point that the physiology of the organ in question changed,” Fr. Gori said.

On the way home from the Mass, Mattheus told his mother that he was already cured. At home, he asked for French fries, rice, beans, and steak – the favorite foods of his brothers.

He ate everything on his plate. He didn’t vomit. He ate normally the next day, and the next. Vianna took Mattheus to physicians, who were mystified by Mattheus’ healing.

 

On Feb. 22, 2020, Pope Francis approved the miracle paving the way for his beatification.

In May 2024, Pope Francis approved a second miracle attributed to Carlo: the unlikely recovery in 2022 of a Costa Rican woman who suffered a traumatic head injury in a bicycle accident while studying at a university in Florence, Italy. That miracle cleared the path to his canonization.

On his website, Carlo wrote a list of instructions for becoming holy, encouraging people to go to Mass daily and confession weekly. But his very first rule for becoming holy was this: “You must want it with all your heart.”

This is the legacy of Saint Carlo Acutis: an ordinary, modern kid who watched cartoons and used the internet and wanted holiness with all his heart. This is why the world loves him. Because he shows us that holiness is possible for every one of us even if you have an Instagram account even if you’re a gamer.

In his own words: ‘Holiness is possible for you, right now, but you have to want it.’