Since this is the season of gratitude and giving, I’d like to give thanks for new friendships. Greg Cellini, OSF, who authored this month’s article on peace-building—the last in our short series of articles that tackle social issues from a Franciscan perspective—has become a friend to me over the past year. When we meet periodically via Zoom, I look forward to his cheerfulness and good humor (and his East Coast accent is a delight to my Midwestern ears). But his article this month, in which he offers readers simple directions to spread a message of peace, registered with me strongly. “Maybe if I can give up the need to be right and, instead, be a peacemaker,” he writes, “I can help create this miracle.” Amen! 

I’m also grateful to you, our readers. I appreciate that you allow our humble Franciscan magazine into your homes. We hope you have a peace-filled holiday season. And let us pray that 2025 is happier. We deserve it. 

We live in a culture of instant gratification where most anything we want is just one click away. Advent invites us to slow down and savor the season of expectation, longing, and hope. 

Advent, which begins December 1, is four weeks of preparing ourselves spiritually in expectation of the birth of God made flesh in Jesus at Christmas. At least it’s supposed to be. 

If you haven’t noticed, we’re now caught up in a world where we can click here, add to cart now, and get same-day delivery. Who has time to wait?  And, if you live in a large enough metropolitan area, there’s sure to be at least one radio station that’s been playing nothing but Christmas songs since before Thanksgiving. 

OK, so the odds may seem stacked against you. But things weren’t looking so good for Moses and the Israelites at the Red Sea, or Daniel in the lion’s den, and they turned out all right. Putting on the brakes and shunting aside the energy of the cultural clash is tame by comparison. 

Advent Traditions 

“My own sense, my own practice of Advent has changed and deepened over time,” says Mary Beth Newkumet, a columnist in the Catholic press who writes for Magnificat magazine and has become a grandmother. “When [my children] were smaller, I focused on some of the outward things: the Advent wreath; we’d celebrate the feast of St. Nicholas (December 6); we’d celebrate Santa Lucía (December 13). We link it to the liturgical year and some of those beautiful customs of the Church. They are now doing that with their own kids, which I find very beautiful.” 

On one hand, Newkumet asks: “Who wouldn’t want more Christmas? The lights and the excitement and the anticipation of the feast. I get why the culture does that, right? At the same time, I’m at a place where I’m really looking for the Incarnation. I’m looking for Christ. I find myself longing for more depth and more of a sense of sensibility and more encounters with the living Jesus with the Incarnation.” 

Distractions are hardly limited to Advent, but “Advent is more difficult, because you have more of the holiday and Christmas things going on, and it’s all around you everywhere you look,” says Beth Dotson Brown, a Catholic novelist who also directs the mentor program at Partners for Rural Impact in eastern Kentucky. 

“Here’s an example of how crazy our culture is. I went to the dollar store the other day. And they have plastic pumpkins for Halloween. It’s July! And when that’s over, you’ll have Thanksgiving and Christmas things,” Dotson Brown says. 

She finds support in a prayer group that she’s been part of for more than 30 years. The women met on a Cursillo weekend. “We try to keep one another focused on the seasons that we’re in, and, outside of that season, to remember what could be distracting us,” says Dotson Brown. “We’re enriching our use of our time and/or attention. It’s important to have someone to share the struggles with—and the rewards with.” 

Dotson Brown recalls a family tradition she associates with Advent. “My grandmother learned many years ago how to make a good old-fashioned gingerbread house, the kind you glue together with sugar-water icing. It sits throughout the whole season, which is symbolic of Advent. You make it yourself. And as a kid you want to eat it, ’cause it tastes good. But it joins you in waiting through the Advent season. And in our family, we’d break it on New Year’s Day.” 

“Sometimes it’s good not to have immediate gratification,” she continues. 

A Season of Longing 

It may help to know Advent’s liturgical underpinnings. 

The season is all about “expectation, longing, hope,” says Rita Thiron, executive director of the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions. The Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year and the Calendar puts it this way: “Advent has a twofold character, for it is a time of preparation for the Solemnities of Christmas, in which the first coming of the Son of God to humanity is remembered, and likewise a time when, by remembrance of this, minds and hearts are led to look forward to Christ’s second coming at the end of time.” 

The liturgical calendar didn’t suddenly pop up one day. “We begin to see Christmas in the late fourth century,” Thiron says. “In turn, we begin to see preparation for Christmas—Advent—in the decades following.” 

She quoted the late Jesuit Father Robert Taft, a liturgical scholar, who said, “The First Sunday of Advent is not just the first day of the liturgical year. It is its seam,” connecting the previous liturgical year with the new one. 

In November, there’s “the remembering the dead, the end-time, and we must be prepared because we don’t know what’s coming [or] when Jesus will be coming,” Thiron explains. “The First Sunday of Advent, we hear John the Baptist saying the same darn thing: Be prepared! It’s prayed, year after year after year after year. The end-time, yes, but hope.” 

Yet schools—even Catholic schools—have Christmas concerts before Christmas Day. “Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we’re celebrating, we’re shopping, we’re decorating, and that’s not a terrible thing. However, it does rob us of the anticipation that Advent gives us and the expectation that Advent gives us, and hope to prepare our hearts and our homes for such a gorgeous feast as the Nativity of the Lord,” Thiron says. “And then we can pull out all the stops and celebrate for 12 days until the Baptism of the Lord. You can’t talk about Advent without talking Christmas.” 

How to Make the Most of Advent 

Mary Jo Paquin and her husband, Del, raised eight children in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, an hour outside Detroit. Now she’s raising 22 chickens and two ducks. 

“When our family was young, we were very intentional about Advent and making sure Christmas was about Jesus’ birthday,” Paquin says. “When the kids were little—[as] Catholic homeschool moms—you celebrate Advent, no Christmas songs until Christmas.” 

When their older children got into high school and more exposed to the culture, the family “softened” its approach to Advent but clung to the traditions that mattered most. 

“Oh, it’s OK,” she recalls saying. “We’re still holding on to the important things. We bless our Advent wreath. We have our prayers together. We have our meals together as a family group and keep our focus on what the season is for. If the culture is rushing ahead, let’s try to grab onto the good things.” 

Spiritual directors offered advice on how to be more observant during Advent. 

“Usually I recommend that they understand how the Lord would like them to prepare for Christmas this year, because every year is different and every year they’re in a different space,” says Father Bill Neubecker, a priest of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary who has been a spiritual director for more than 40 years, including 29 in Brazil. The question he asks of those who come to him, he adds, is, “How do they sense that they need to prepare, or how do they sense that the Lord is inviting them to prepare for Christmas?” 

In Brazil, according to Father Neubecker, preparation during Advent is traditionally done with a novena. “It’s sort of like Advent at home. Everybody who’s doing the novena, they have a holy picture on their front door so that people know that they’re doing their preparation for Christmas. And usually they [invite] their neighbors and their other family members to participate.” 

Thinking about booking a flight to Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo to spend Advent? Don’t bother. 

“When I first went to Brazil, they had a different culture, and 80 percent lived in the rural areas,” Father Neubecker recalls. “And then when I left Brazil, it was just the opposite: 80 percent lived in urban areas. That means a whole change of culture, lifestyle. That means a lot of the modern, secular values are mixed in with Advent now.” 

Still, Father Neubecker draws on the traditions he experienced in Brazil in his ministry in the States. “I invite them to do the daily Mass reading, the novenas in the back of the church,” he notes. 

‘Doing Hopeful Things’ 

Nancy Small, associate director for spiritual direction initiatives at the Jesuits’ Office of Ignatian Spirituality, completed her spiritual director training in 1994. 

“Advent is a great season that invites contemplation. It invites us to take a sacred pause and really steep ourselves in the hope of the season,” Small says. She finds inspiration in the readings from Isaiah, which describe “the peace we will find on God’s holy mountain.” 

What does Small herself do to get into Advent? 

“Given that I’m so taken with the hope of the season, I try to practice doing hopeful things. [Father] Dan Berrigan, a great Jesuit and prophet of peace, asked, ‘How do you maintain peace?’ He said, ‘By doing hopeful things.’ Doing something hopeful. It doesn’t have to be big. It might be something I read, or making a contribution to making the world in the way I want it to be,” Small says. 

“By really trying to practice something hopeful—we talk about Advent, about creating a space for Jesus in our heart—I feel my heart is primed to meet him, to recognize him, and I think even to recognize the places where that hope is so much more alive in the world. I feel like I’m meeting a kindred spirit,” she continues. 

Sister Nancy Sheridan, a sister of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, has been leading retreats on Advent for about 15 years. About half the retreatants return year after year. “With time, I was able to ask them to help me choose the Advent theme for the following year,” Sister Sheridan says. This year’s theme is “Embracing Advent’s Stillness.” 

“For most people who come to an Advent retreat in a very busy season, they’re searching for the silence and the quiet of the focusing on the essential—what Advent is about: the watching, the waiting, the wondering,” Sister Sheridan says. 

The psalms and canticles associated with Advent are just part of it. “Advent stories involving the Annunciation, Joseph’s dreams—Advent is so rich in terms of its imagery and poetry that it speaks volumes,” Sister Sheridan says. Each year, she creates a piece of poetry inspired by the retreat that she sends to friends and colleagues. 

Anybody needing a dose of hope or encouragement at this time can look to Sister Sheridan as an example. For the past several years, she has been living with stage 4 ovarian cancer. “But I continue with this journey because I believe strongly in it,” she says. 

On All Souls’ Day, we celebrate all those who have passed away. This author addresses questions people may have about the practicalities of a Catholic death and burial. 

I recently noticed a new poster in my church that lists the corporal works of mercy. Burying the dead caught my attention and stirred up a lot of questions. I’m in my mid-60s, and thoughts of death periodically pop up as I get older. But even my young adult children wonder about the practicalities. 

On Ash Wednesday, we hear the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Because of this, many people believe it doesn’t matter what happens after we die. That isn’t true. Each person has a unique body and soul, and, although they are separated at the moment of death, they will be reunited at the end of the world. Our bodies are part of our identities as human beings, and what happens to them when we die is important. 

For example, do bodies have to be buried in a coffin, or can they be left to decay in one of the increasingly prevalent “natural cemeteries,” where they gradually deteriorate to fertilize the ground? Can a body be buried in a community cemetery if it’s not specifically Catholic? Do bodies have to be buried in a cemetery at all? What about donating a body to science for research, teaching, or organ transplant? Catholics can be cremated, but then what? Can the ashes be scattered in a favorite spot or displayed on the mantel? 

First, it’s important to remember that we are created in the image of God: “God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them” (Gen 1:27). We know our bodies are precious to God: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Cor 6:19). 

Because of this, our physical bodies require absolute respect, love, and dignity in both life and death. This cherished gift, this body—the only one God has given us—is unique and individual. It is not obliterated, reincarnated, or absorbed into the vast cosmos of the universe when we die. It waits for the resurrection at the end of time when soul and body will be reunited in heaven with God for eternity. 

The Catholic Church teaches that the best way to honor a deceased person is through burial and interring the entire body in the ground, but cremation is also allowed. This process reduces the body to bone and ashes that are then collected into an urn. The cemetery is the traditional place for the burial of deceased remains, either in a grave or niche specifically designed for urns. The burial spot should be in or on consecrated ground and clearly marked so family, friends, and even strangers can pause in remembrance and pray for the deceased’s soul. Praying for the dead is one of the seven corporal works of mercy. The living and dead, both those in purgatory and those in heaven, are part of the communion of saints, part of the Church, and we all pray for each other. 

Now, armed with our understanding of this fundamental Catholic theology, let’s look at the questions raised above. 

✧ Do bodies have to be buried in a coffin, or can they be left to decay in one of the increasingly prevalent ‘natural cemeteries’? ✧ Bodily remains do not have to be embalmed and can be buried in a simple wooden coffin in a marked grave. The body and coffin will gradually decay, and the marker allows family and friends a place to pray. In this sense, a green cemetery is acceptable. 

Human composting is different. In this process, the body is surrounded by plant material and microbes and placed in a container where it is treated with heat and oxygen. In about a month, the entire body—tissue and bone—is decomposed and becomes soil. There is literally nothing left of the human body, and it’s indistinguishable from the rest of the compost. This is what makes it an unacceptable alternative. 

Some green cemeteries also distinguish between permanent and successive gravesites. A permanent or “perpetual” burial site will never be used for any other person or purpose. The marker will remain for visitors and future generations. A successive burial site is one that is reused after 50–60 years, when a naturally buried corpse is likely to have deteriorated. Although the cemetery keeps permanent records, there is no marker or place to visit, pray, and remember. This is not an acceptable alternative either. 

✧ Can a body be buried in a community cemetery if it’s not specifically Catholic? Do bodies have to be buried in a cemetery at all? ✧ A Catholic can be buried in a non-Catholic cemetery. Part of the funeral liturgy is the “interment,” in which the ground itself is blessed and consecrated. Even a family cemetery can be consecrated in this way. 

Many churches and dioceses have Catholic cemeteries, but in certain parts of the country and the world, there’s no such thing. The Code of Canon Law says that a person can be buried in the parish cemetery, if there is one, unless the family chooses otherwise. Everyone gets to decide where they want to be buried. 

Cemeteries provide a connection for those who are left behind, a link between the past and future. They are places that coming generations can visit and care for. Many families regularly visit their relatives’ graves, planting flowers and brushing debris away from the stones. 

November is the traditional month to remember the dead, and many cemeteries light luminaries on the graves. It’s part of our Christian responsibility to preserve the memory of the deceased and to pray for them, not only members of our immediate family but also the whole Christian community. By our prayer, we give visible witness to our Catholic faith in the Resurrection. 

✧ What about donating a body to science for research, teaching, or organ transplant? ✧ In Pope John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, he describes organ donation as heroism, “offering a chance of health and even of life itself to the sick who sometimes have no other hope.” Transplants are acceptable for Catholics to give and receive. Donating part of ourselves is a great act of compassion and fosters a culture of life in a world that too often prioritizes selfishness. Donating our entire bodies for research and teaching is also acceptable, as it recalls Jesus’ gift of his whole self on the cross for us. 

Several requirements must be met, however. In both living and deceased organ donation, the gift must be freely given without any reward or compensation, and there can be no favoritism for the distribution of the organs. Finally, consent must also be freely given by the donor before death or by proxy after death. Nonvital organs (kidney, lung, parts of liver or pancreas) can be donated while we are alive. Single organs, or those whose absence would affect our health and life (like corneas, heart, stomach, and heart valves), can’t be donated until after death. 

Organ donation after death does not change the funeral or burial; everything carries on as if the body were completely intact. Even when an entire body is given to science and is not returned to the family, a memorial Mass is celebrated. It is identical to a funeral, except that no remains are present. 

✧ Catholics can be cremated, but then what? Can the ashes be scattered in a favorite spot or displayed on the mantel? ✧ Although the Church still considers the burial of the body ideal, heat cremation is allowed. In this process, high heat and flame incinerate the body’s tissues, leaving only bone fragments behind. The ashes and fragments, often called cremains, are then gathered into an urn that can be placed in an ossuary for the funeral or in the ground for burial. 

Cremated remains should be treated with the same respect and dignity as a body, and nothing should be done with ashes that wouldn’t be done to an intact body. Thus, all parts should be kept together. Obviously, in cases of war or trauma, that can’t always happen, but even then, as much as possible is gathered back together. This is the rationale for the restriction against scattering ashes in a favorite location, resting them on a mantel or shelf, or dividing them into jewelry pieces. 

Water cremation is a different process than heat cremation and is not in keeping with Catholic teaching. Also called alkaline hydrolysis, it uses water, potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide, heat, and pressure to dissolve a body within 3–16 hours. Ultimately, the body is reduced to bone fragments and about 100 gallons of fluid. Proponents say it is a gentler process, uses less energy, and is more palatable to family members who might find flame cremation difficult to accept. 

The difference between heat and water cremation is what happens at the end. In heat cremation, the bone fragments and ashes are gathered together into an urn. In water cremation, the bone fragments can be retrieved, but the 100 pounds of fluid is poured down the drain as wastewater. The process is legal in 21 states, though not all have functioning facilities available. 

And so . . .  

The world will continue to find new ways to deal with death. Even now, the technology to turn human remains into manufactured diamonds is available. Just because something is available, though, doesn’t make it right. The best way to consider future options is to remember the basic tenets of our Catholic teaching. 

Body parts should be kept together and treated with love and respect, whether buried or cremated. Human remains cannot be turned into something else, and the burial site needs to be clearly marked. For Catholics, the practical details of dealing with death speak loudly to our faith and our certainty that we will be with God, body and soul, for eternity. 

We know our bodies are precious to God: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spxirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Cor 6:19). 

Using this language, then, let us rise and stand. Let our rising be the expression that we are rising to this occasion in deep mindfulness of what it signifies. Let our standing be a mindful gesture: mindful of the ground on which we are standing, the one little plot of land on this earth not belonging to one nation, but to all nations united. It is a small piece of land, indeed, but it is a symbol of human concord, a symbol of the truth that this poor, mistreated earth belongs to all of us together. 

As we stand, then, like plants standing on a good plot of ground, let us sink our roots deep into our hidden unity. Allow yourself to feel what it means to stand and to extend your inner roots. Rooted in the soil of the heart, let us expose ourselves to the wind of the Spirit, the one Spirit who moves all who let themselves be moved. Let us breathe deeply the breath of the one Spirit. 

Let our standing bear witness that we take a stand on common ground. Let our standing be an expression of reverence for all those who before us have taken a stand for human unity. Let us stand with reverence on the ground of our common human endeavor, joining all those who stood on this ground, from the first shaper of tools to the engineers of the most complex machines and institutions. 

Let us stand with reverence on the common ground of the human quest for meaning, side by side with all who ever stood on this ground in their searching thought, in their celebration of beauty, in their dedicated service. Let us stand in reverence before all those who on our common ground stood up to be counted, stood up—and were cut down. 

Let us remember that to stand up as we have now stood up implies a readiness to lay down one’s life for that for which one stands. Let us stand in awe before those thousands upon thousands—known and unknown—who have laid down their lives for the common cause of our human family. 

Let us bow our heads. Let us bow our heads to them. Let us stand and bow our heads because we stand under judgment. We stand under judgment, for “One is the human spirit.” If we are one with the heroes and prophets, we are also one with those who persecuted and killed them. One with the henchmen as we are one with the victims. We all share the glory of human greatness and the shame of human failure. 

Lift It Up 

Let me to invite you to focus your mind on the most inhuman act of destruction you can find in your memory. And now take this, together with all human violence, all human greed, injustice, stupidity, hypocrisy, all human misery, and lift it all up, with all the strength of your heart, into the stream of compassion and healing that pulsates through the heart of the world—that center in which all our hearts are one. 

This is not an easy gesture. It may seem difficult for some of us. But until we can reach and tap with our deepest roots this common source of concord and compassion, we have not yet claimed within our own hearts that oneness that is our common human birthright. 

Standing firm, then, in this oneness, let us close our eyes to bring home to ourselves our blindness as we face the future. Let us close our eyes to focus our minds on the inner light, our one common light, in whose brightness we shall be able to walk together even in the dark. Let us close our eyes as a gesture of trust in the guidance of the one Spirit who will move us if we but open our hearts. 

“One is the human Spirit,” but the human Spirit is more than human because the human heart is unfathomable. Into this depth let us silently sink our roots. 

There lies our only source of peace. Let our celebration culminate and conclude in this gesture, by which we will send one another forth as messengers of peace. Let us do this now.

Prayer

God of peace, 
Anger surrounds me, trying to build a home in my heart. 
With your help, I will counter that anger with love. 
With your guidance, I will choose the way of peace and humility. 
With your will, I can rise above the chaos 
and the noise and the hatred to a place  
of stillness where I know you await me. 
Amen. 

“Not me, but God,” Blessed Carlo Acutis is quoted as saying. When this author visited Assisi, she discovered the growing excitement surrounding the millennial teenager’s life, legacy, and sainthood cause. 

In the sunny Piazza del Comune, the center square of Assisi, I shift over on the stairs away from the ancient two-tiered fountain because when the spring wind gusts, I get blessed with its falling water droplets. I fall into a cheerful conversation with a group of already sunburned Irish people sitting under an umbrella at the cafe, declining their invitation to take a chair at their table several times, then I shyly join when they keep insisting. 

“I’m Maeve. That’s Nora, Finn, and Barry.” 

I say my own name and clap my hand over my heart for emphasis, having barely spoken to anyone in English for three days, and relying instead on exaggerated gestures and pantomime to communicate. 

“Maureen?” Maeve asks. “Are you Irish, then?” 

“Partly. Maureen Mary Mary O’Brien, because my Protestant mom didn’t know that a Catholic Confirmation name wasn’t supposed to be the same as the child’s middle name.” 

They all laugh and tell me they are in Italy to celebrate Nora’s 50th birthday, which happened two years ago, but they had to cancel the plans until now due to the pandemic. I nod. My feelings about my own 50th birthday are a silent predawn inside me: I awoke in Hartford Hospital to my surgeon telling me he got the pathology report that morning, and I would need more surgery, but he believed he got all the cancer out. I was given a second chance, first with addiction, then with cancer, my life now a double doublet. 

They’re quite inquisitive about me and enthusiastic about the book I’m writing when I tell them why I am in Assisi all alone. They’re clever conversationalists and leap around topics with wit and curiosity. One of my favorite things about traveling is that friendships are accelerated, forming very fast. They are from Northern Ireland, and Barry explains to me—a quick sketch of the Troubles—the conflict between Protestants and Catholics. They ask me about being Catholic in America, and I tell them my Franciscan church is welcoming of the gay community, and he feels comfortable enough to confide that he and Finn “are together.” 

We end up laughing about how all Irish families, even ones with watered-down Irish genes, seem to be stocked with secrets. I connect Nora’s name to the wife of the great Irish writer James Joyce. I’m ridiculously proud of the fact that Barry is visibly impressed when I brag about how I didn’t skip a single word of all 856 pages of Ulysses. 

“How did you do that, Maureen?” he liltingly jokes. 

Meet Blessed Carlo 

We only have a few hours before their train returns to Rome. “Have you seen Carlo Acutis?” Maeve asks. 

I shake my head. “No, who?” 

“The teenager. From Italy. The soccer player who died of cancer. They say more people are coming to Assisi to see him than even Francis.” 

“Oh! That’s who that is?” I’d noticed flyers taped on the front windows of the religious tchotchke shops selling all variations of St. Francis and St. Clare. I knew nothing about this boy holding the viewer’s gaze, squinting into both the sun and the camera, cropped shiny black curls, the geometric fields of the Italian countryside far below him, and two wide straps of his backpack on either shoulder. Underneath his portrait it read “Non io ma Dio,” but I didn’t know what that meant. 

“His body is in Santa Maria Maggiore,” Maeve continues. “He died at 15, having an extraordinary faith, Maureen. He had spent his life designing a website devoted to recording the hundreds of miracles of the Eucharist. His devotion was of the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. He wasn’t even from a religious family! He went to church every day as a child. He’s always pictured with his backpack. That’s his sign. Do you want to go there with us now?” 

“Absolutely.” 

We gather our things from the table, and I happily follow them down the piazza and through side streets to the church. A crowd chatters inside excitedly despite signs reading “Silenzio.” A white marble coffin, with Carlo inside, is raised up on pillars and illuminated. A homespun wreath of family photos is displayed nearby on the floor. Just like the ritual of a funeral, the images of his holidays, sporting events, all the captured childhood moments are plucked straight from his mother’s photo albums. 

In the ornate sarcophagus in which he lies, the front panels can slide open and show him in repose. In order to discourage crowds, these panels have been shut during COVID-19. When he was beatified—becoming officially “Blessed,” one step short of sainthood—at the Basilica of St. Francis here, over 40,000 came to this town in the course of three weeks. I am relieved I cannot see him in there. Though really, what is the difference between his remains and those of St. Clare in her crypt that I just viewed a few hours ago? That he is simply more recently dead? This veneration in Catholicism fills me with contradictions. I find it shocking, weirdly thrilling, comforting, repellent, and fascinating. 

At the end of the room is a life-size cardboard cutout of him with a human-size chalice and Eucharist. I’m sorry to say it seems tacky to me, like a cutout you’d have at a high school graduation. Though who am I to judge, since he never even got to have a graduation? People are posing in front of the sarcophagus. Mostly Italians, a few international tourists. So many of us wear sneakers to church now. I’m always amazed at the older ladies with big beads who still wear pantyhose and pumps with chunky heels to dress with respect; they kiss their hands then lovingly touch Carlo’s marble sides. 

Silenzio

Expressing my faith with brand-new friends nourishes me. Back home, I spend a good deal of time in my friendships alone with it, in silenzio. It’s exhilarating to worship together, and because we’re all on holiday, it’s fun. I’m not shy to bow my head with them as we sit together on a bench. Maeve takes blank sheets of paper and pens near the sarcophagus to write our individual intentions. We scribble, then fold the papers in half and quarters and slip them, with all the others left by people seeking change and healing, into a plastic box, half full. I place my left hand upon his crypt, palm fully open. It’s refreshingly cold, soothing the relentless heat of the brokenness I’ve endured in the dust and screws of my deformed wrist for nearly a decade. 

They only have a short time left. They want to see Clare, and we head down to the basilica. Nora and I share that we both wrote intentions for our children. “It was also very strange, Maureen, because just as I was writing a prayer for her, she called me,” Nora says. 

“She felt it,” Maeve reassures her. 

Walking with them down the street, the men ahead, it seems it’s always been this way, the five of us joking around and crossing ourselves unabashedly as we enter churches. It’s why I feel that Assisi is my home. I can be the holy fool that I am and not think twice about hiding it or defending myself. Beginning my day at one of the basilicas, blessing myself over and over, kneeling and whispering prayers into my woven hands, then I go to San Rufino and bless myself, whisper some more, not caring who sees because no one thinks I’m a weirdo as they, too, are worshiping. They, too, believe. I stop by San Stefano Church in the middle of Communion and get in line, then later in the day, walk into Santa Maria while a rosary is being said, and I join in. 

Too soon, we must part. Maeve hugs me. “Maureen, come see us in Ireland.” How I would love to go, having only been once, but I know there’s limited time now in my life to return to the faraway places I’ve fallen in love with. 

The Physical Signs of Devotion 

I climb back up Via S. Rufino to my apartment and do some research. I have to laugh because, once again, I’m the blind man not fully seeing. I’ll always be a bit of a Mr. Magoo. Apparently, I was just in a church where a powerfully historic event occurred. Blessed Carlo Acutis lies in the Santuario della Spogliazione, the Shrine of the Stripping. The site where, in front of his father, Francis threw off his luxurious clothes, renounced the wealth of his family, and stood naked, choosing to follow Christ. No gold, no money, haversack, shoes, no more than one tunic. 

I learn the boy’s heart is now a relic. Relics: a strange practice, yet I’m transfixed. A piece of Carlo’s pericardium, a bit of this sac, is traveling to waiting congregations around the world. So now, while I am in Italy near his bones, a fragment of this beatified boy is back in my country, in New York City. We’ve crisscrossed on our flight paths. 

Whatever one thinks of this practice, and I am not always quite sure myself, I am left with the image of this boy’s heart. My heart. The Sacred Heart. The sac that holds our hearts in place in our bodies, enclosing our hearts and the roots of our vessels. There’s an outer layer and an inner double layer—a double doublet within us all. 

A relic is defined as something that remains, left over, a portion. Bones, objects, clothing, not just in Christianity, but in Buddhism and Hinduism too. It can be something kept for sentimental reasons, which makes me think we all have relics. I wonder what you have? What jewelry of loved ones who have passed do you hang on your body? What objects of theirs do you house? 

I do understand that the idea of relics, of death or impermanence, creates a desire to look away. Some people never look at it at all. My mother, at 85, is looking. The week before I came to Italy, I went to see her in Maine. 

“I might not be here much longer,” she said as we toured all the trees in her yard. Should she bother pruning them? “I’m not going to worry about it,” she decided as she poked her cane in the center softness of a stump. There was, perhaps, resignation, but not any bitterness in her voice. Just the truth. And surrender. 

Later, slumped on her couch with the heating pad relieving the pain of a hairline fracture in her spine, she asked me, “What do people do with all their stuff?” Genuinely wondering as she looked about her home of the last 30 years. All the furniture, books, doodads. Her husband has died before her, so she now surveyed their 62 years together. Upstairs, she placed the urn with my father’s ashes, his Purple Heart from Korea, and a black-and-white photo of him lined up, on the top row, holding the American flag for Platoon 80. 

I tried to reassure her. I’ve thought about this quite a bit myself, trying to minimize what my children might have to do for me after I go. “I mean, it’s true, Mom, when someone dies, someone has to tend to the stuff after them. Everyone leaves something behind, right? Unless we live in a monastery with nothing, but even then, someone has to figure out what to do with the bed.” It’s a fairly ridiculous viewpoint, and we laughed. 

That night of my visit, I found solitude in the lamplight as my mother slept, and I realized what made her saddest was that the objects in her house had sentimental value. Much of her conversations consist of, “That was my mother’s” or “That was Grandma Mann’s.” Her walls are decorated with the work of her grandmother, framed cross-stitches of strawberries and sparrows with phrases such as, “Warm friendship like the golden sun shines kindly light on everyone.” And my favorite, “Leave no tender word unsaid, love while life shall last.” 

The Sweetness of Sanctuary 

And now, in Italy, far from my mother’s relics, I’m close to other ones. Assisi’s two main churches are the Basilica of St. Francis and the Basilica of St. Clare. In the bottom of each lie the saint’s bones. I have been here many days, and the bells ring all day, every 15 minutes, and are silent at night when I believe these churches, one at each end of the town, are the paperweights holding down the edges of the winds that encircle the earth. 

Francis has a double basilica that, I swear, every sunset, has rays of sun fanning wide from the clouds floating above it (I have proof). The lower Romanesque part was built in 1230, and atop that, the upper basilica, Gothic in style, completed in 1253. The whole cathedral borders on ineffable; it surrounds me, soars above me, fills the sky. But I also know the wonder in the little, and in the corner of the ornate lower basilica, tiny stitches whisper to me from St. Francis’ tunic, the one he once wore, protected, pressed flat under glass. Yellow tracks run wildly all over the course brown fabric, covering it in patches and rips, like flaps repaired. 

The frescoes inside, by Cimabue and his pupil Giotto, took another hundred years to paint. I go to bask in their energy every morning and night. The church closes at 7:00 p.m. Italians don’t heed time like Americans, so the guard is visibly annoyed with me as I slide into the church at 6:50. He’s done. The evening has turned cold with rain, and he wants to close up shop. But I have 10 minutes! The guard has waved everyone out, sighing, but allows me to slip through. 

He doesn’t even bother to keep his eye on me as he wanders out the doors. I look around for silhouettes of people, but there’s no one. I am alone. Tourists from all over the world flock here in droves all day, but now, here I am, in the most exalted church in the whole world, and for 60 seconds, I am given the unexpected gift of having this entire basilica to myself. Half the lights are already turned off. Its emptiness I would not describe as quiet or tranquil. What is it? It’s sweet. It’s absolute sweetness. 

I am underneath one of the most perfect frescoes ever painted, S. Francesco Riceve le Stimmate (St. Francis Receives the Stigmata). The wounds of Jesus. Floating above Francis, Jesus is part bird, part angel, arms open, feathered wings spread wide. His face is erased from the two earthquakes that struck, the double tremor, in 1997. People were tragically killed here, and many of these frescoes were destroyed. It adds to the powerful understanding of impermanence. And fragility. 

The guard returns and shoos me out with the Italian word for “closing.” He doesn’t care that I think this Giotto fresco is beautiful. And I don’t care that he doesn’t care. I’m emboldened by my glorious stolen moment. I tell him it’s beautiful anyway. 

It’s midnight. I feel the relics out there, a gilded triptych. Clare, Carlo, Francis. It fills me with the desire to find them, not just while awake but always, even in my dreams. I write to Francis in my journal: “Let me dream tonight of the stitches in your tunic, the knots holding your patches together; let me dream tonight of your arms wide open in the moonlight.” 

And the miracles, all of them, move forward, as miracles do, and this new one, a boy who believed, who chronicled miracles about holy bread. Just a kid! Just a kid, a child who gave all he had to God until the very end. It was Blessed Carlo Acutis, perhaps soon-to-be a saint, who said, “Non io ma Dio” (which I learn means, “Not me, but God”). And perhaps one day there will be statues of him in the back of the basilicas, but Blessed Carlo is already guiding us with the straps of his school backpack and his pair of black Nikes. 

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) 

Disgraced filmmaker Woody Allen has no career left in this country, but that shouldn’t erase his extensive and impressive work before his fall. In this classic, he centers the narrative on three New York City sisters and their entangled dramas over two Thanksgivings. The ensemble cast shines here, particularly Dianne Wiest in her Oscar-winning role as the most neurotic (and interesting) of the three siblings. Perhaps no other film in Allen’s repertoire captures an American family quite like this. 

Home for the Holidays (1995)

Two-time Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster never found the same success behind the camera as she did in front of it, but this sweet little film from 1995 is an earnest effort on her part. While the story is certainly prescribed—about a funny, dysfunctional family who gather for the holidays—it’s the cast that elevates it to a level above formulaic. Led by the criminally underused Holly Hunter, but amply supported by Anne Bancroft and Robert Downey Jr., Home for Holidays celebrates how family, when we feel the most broken, can put us back together. 

One True Thing (1998) 

On the surface, it’s a two-tissue tearjerker about a mother and daughter who rebuild their relationship through terminal illness—and it is just that. But this holiday-tinged family portrait cuts deeper thanks to the searing performance of Meryl Streep as a mother who tries to build one last bridge to her cynical, career-driven daughter, played by an equally effective Renée Zellweger. The interplay between the two actors is at once resonant, painful, and deeply authentic. 

Pieces of April (2003) 

Bitterness, mistrust, illness, and healing are on the menu of writer/director Peter Hedges’ underrated gem. Katie Holmes anchors this honest and impactful drama as April, a young woman who invites her estranged family for Thanksgiving dinner, hoping to mend relationships. This is no easy task since Joy, April’s mother, played to acidic perfection by Patricia Clarkson, is on the guest list. Gritty, sarcastic, with just the right touch of melancholy, Pieces of April is a rich, satisfying cinematic meal. Dig in!