November 4, 2022
Dear Friends,
Two years ago, you may remember there being a huge news and public relations (PR) push about the beatification of a possible new saint, Blessed Carlo Acutis. It was (and is) a big deal. The media and PR companies were using phrases like a saint who wore jeans or a saint who played Pokémon and video games - anything to draw interest into this young man who did great work until his own passing. I have a friend who works in PR and sometimes when I hear ads on Pandora or Spotify or other media streaming services, I like to let my opinion be known. A few weeks ago, I was fired up about an entire PR campaign about Quaker Oats needing to advertise they were the GOAT (greatest oatmeal of all time). Also, they were the official sponsor of the NFL (or something like that). It was a ridiculous campaign (also when you hear oatmeal do you really think of anyone else but them?) Anyway, I digress.
The excitement for Blessed Carlo being beatified was something of great important; however, the way in which they decided to market him has me baffled. While I realize they were trying to bring relevance to our youth, the headlines didn’t really talk about the significance of his missionary work. I am stealing this next bit from Wikipedia (I need to go finish spackling in the church), so I am not going to paraphrase: Those around him considered him a "computer geek" on account of his passion and skill with computers and the internet. Acutis applied himself to creating a website dedicated to cataloguing each reported Eucharistic miracle in the world. He completed this in 2005, having started compiling the catalogue at the age of eleven.
Anyone trying to work in HTML during 2005 knows how hard it was to build a website. Working in HTML and the early website programming languages is not as it is now. You could not just drag and drop. That in and of itself had to have taken a large amount of work. In our faith, it is easy to take the Eucharist for granted, to not have that understanding of what it is that we are receiving or just thinking bread and wine. Over the years, there have been multitudes of miracles concerning the Body and Blood of Christ, of which most of us are not aware.
Over the weekend, we are having our second Family Faith event for the children in our Faith Formation program. Families will be coming to mass. We are asking that they experience a traveling display of the Eucharistic Miracles that Blessed Carlo documented. During our Saints and Cider picnic, as our children were learning about the various saints, we made sure they learned about Blessed Carlo. We want to continue their education about this young man and the work he did to evangelize the Eucharist.
While the traveling Eucharistic Miracle display is primarily for our faith formation families to experience, on Saturday and Sunday, there will be opportunities for all of us to walk the display in Heritage Hall and in our classrooms. If you have the time, consider experiencing this traveling display on Saturday from 3 pm - 7 pm and Sunday from 7:30 am with a hard stop at 2:00 pm. If you cannot join us, you can also see the virtual tour online.
God Bless,
Fr. Brian
P.S. As I hope you have noticed these puns tend to loosely connect to the Wisdom/Whimsy, I will not use any Eucharist puns, since I find them to be mostly in bad taste.
P.P.S. Why do ghosts make good cheerleaders? They’ve got loads of spirit.