A favorite childhood memory of mine goes back to when I was  a student at St. Henry’s Catholic School in Cleveland, Ohio. When Halloween came around, we were reminded that this day really meant “All Saints’ Eve” because the following day would be All Saints’ Day, a holy day of obligation and a day off from school. There was much to celebrate. As part of the celebration, the first through third graders were allowed to dress up as a saint — usually their patron saint — and we would march through the halls of St. Henry’s School while the fourth through eighth graders sang “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

My patron saint, St. Louis, king of France, allowed me to dress up one day a year as a regal monarch with a red cape and crown — the crown painstakingly fashioned each year by my mother out of cardboard-covered aluminum foil (which back then we called “tinfoil”) — and she had to make a new St. Louis the King crown each year for me since my head grew bigger each year (both literally and figuratively!). A lot of the other kids, named after apostles or nuns or monks or medieval saints, wore bathrobes and sandals. I still remember my friend Peter Matia (St. Peter that day, of course) tripping over his robes and getting his paper fish on a string caught in the banister of the stairway, nearly causing the saints not to be marching in but tumbling down. Some of the saints’ costumes and accoutrements, I recall, were quite elaborate if not entirely historically accurate. 

So, I was thinking: if kids did that today, the wardrobe would be a lot easier. You could simply go as St. Carlo Acutis – just postpone a haircut by a couple of weeks, wear jeans and sneakers and a backpack, carry a soccer ball, rosary, and cell phone, and if you have a dog, you could bring him along with you. Voila! How easy and unpretentious is that? See how easy it is to be a saint!

Well, it’s not all that easy, of course.  It’s not a matter of dressing up like a saint but acting like a saint. But that’s not nearly as impossible as it may seem. The most recent saint to be added to the Church’s calendar, St. Carlo Acutis, is being canonized on September 7, 2025, by Pope Leo XIV at a Mass in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. It reminds us that holiness is possible at any age and in every circumstance of life — even in a world of computers and social media. Pope Francis said that “to be saints is not a privilege for the few, but a vocation for everyone.” See, the point is not to simply admire the holiness of St. Carlo but, rather, to imitate and adopt the holiness of St. Carlo in our own lives because, as Pope Francis said, we are all called to be saints.

And here’s the good news: You, too, can become a saint. And here’s the really good news: You don’t need to abandon everything that you enjoy doing to become a saint. Being a saint does not mean that you live in a perpetual “Lent” where you give up all the things you love. Rather, saints do the things they love for the honor and glory of God. And so, saints do the things they love well because they do them not only for themselves but for other people and for God Himself.

Take sports, for instance. I hear many people — priests, parents, and Catholic radio hosts — lament that sports are taking our young people away from the Church. They complain that our young people today place so much of their time and energy on sports that they have no time for attending Mass and prayer. Well, that obviously didn’t happen to St. Carlo, who was both an avid and a really good soccer player. St. Carlo simply placed his love for soccer in its proper perspective. He placed it within the perspective of his love for God. And he attended Mass and adoration daily.

The same is true about Carlo’s love for computer games. He didn’t make an idol out of computer games but, rather, enjoyed the goodness of God in and through them. Carlo actually used the Internet to become a saint by chronicling the eucharistic miracles in a program that is still used to this day by millions of people in order to draw closer to God by acknowledging the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which was, in his own words, his “highway to heaven.”

It was the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, another spiritual master and possible future saint, who wrote: “No man or woman enters heaven by himself or herself. We either bring others in with us, or we are brought in by others.” That’s a good definition of both evangelism and the essence of sainthood — bringing others into heaven with us. We pray today to St. Carlo to bring us into heaven with him, and we pray for the grace to bring others into heaven with us. 

Save the Date:

The Saint Carlo Acutis Veneration Chapel at St. Anne Church in Gorham will be formally dedicated during an 11 a.m. Mass on Sunday, October 12, Carlo’s feast day, with Bishop James Ruggieri as principal celebrant and homilist. The chapel features a first-class relic of St. Carlo, a wall mural depicting Carlo before the background of Assisi, Italy, and a near life-sized hand-carved wooden statue of St. Carlo commissioned from the Stuflesser Studios in Otisei, Italy.  All are invited to attend the dedication Mass.