My dear young sons, I feel moved on the occasion of the canonization of two outstanding young men—Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis—to write you a letter from the heart about my love for you and my hopes for you. I am sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to whistle and looking at our friendly wall of family photos from all the beautiful moments we've had in the last year. You are truly my greatest treasure on this earth, and the most undeserved gift, even if, too, motherhood is somehow my greatest Cross and the path to total self-abnegation.
Dear Hugh, you are four months old, and you fill my mornings with joy in your fuzzy lamb pajamas, carrying on entire conversations with me in your charming babble, smiling and furrowing your brow as though we were together solving all the problems of the world. Your favorite thing right now is looking at picture books during tummy time, and I am enjoying watching you learn to grasp toys. Your dad and I feel that the greatest gift we could have given you is the gift of your baptism. If the beatific vision is better than your smiles, we are in for a real treat.
Dear George, you are four years old, and tearing through life with toy sword outstretched. You love to help pack your lunch in the morning, and I can always count on you to find me for a hug any time of day. You leave orange peels in your wake. The thing you are most proud of in life right now is your new red backpack, which you tote to pre-K4. Your moments of defiance are tempered by moments of tenderness where you tell me, from the heart, "Mama, I love you."
Dear John, your intellect is a force to be reckoned with. I never thought I would need a law degree to raise a six-year-old! I love how one moment you can be sounding your barbaric yawps throughout the backyard and the next can be wrapped in your favorite blanket, quietly devouring the next chapter of Redwall. And though our love language with one another consists mostly of playful jabs and jests, I treasure the moment each morning when you give me the tenderest hug, and the moment each evening when you crack open the bedroom door, freshly showered hair plastered to your forehead, with a goodnight wave. But please give me my tomato stakes back: they are not javelins.
Boys—or "Gentlemen," as I call you, when you are in trouble—I am confident enough in my duty to keep you fed, clothed, and happy (or on some days, just alive), but I am daunted by my duty to educate you in the faith. George, you can sing the whole Salve Regina in Latin and you love playing priest, with dad's Notre Dame football T-shirt as a makeshift cassock: but also, somehow, you complain loudly each time we go to Mass. How can I help you look forward to it? I think of St. Pier Giorgio, who went out of his way to obtain permission to receive communion daily and considered Mass his daily "appointment with the Lord." I don't know how to help you appreciate it more, except to give you memories of my tenderness during the liturgy.
John, you dutifully keep your toy car or your most recent favorite rock tucked in your pocket at Mass, but don't seem too interested in what's going on. You rejected the MagnifiKids subscription I offered you. You're preparing to receive your First Communion next spring, and I wish I knew better how to help you connect with this most sacred moment in the liturgy. How can I convince you that, as St. Carlo said, the Eucharist is the highway to heaven? I only know how to gently turn your body toward the altar and hold it there during the moment of consecration, in what I hope feels more like a hug and less like a trip to the stocks.
My sons, you deserve so much, and one of my most pressing questions for when I meet God face to face is why he would entrust such beautiful souls to so careless and fallen a person as me. Dear Lord, why would you let humans carry on this way? I love you boys with all my might and still fall far short of what you deserve, every day—and I know this even in the limited senses in which I understand the words "love" and "desert."
The greatest things I want to teach you—the kind of things your dad and I spoke about as desiderata during the early, childless years of our marriage—get lost in the day-to-day goings-on of actually raising you. I want to tell you that the greatest adventure in life is to give yourself to God, that being close to the poor is better than being close to the powerful, and that we must balance the maxim "To much has been given, much will be expected," with the question, "What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Cor 4:7)
But instead, your dad and I say things like, "Wipe your hands or you'll get pizza grease on your homework;" You need to ask before you jump on my back, because I'm forty now;" or, "Let's try to find a way to play that involves wearing pants."
The great gift of Saints Carlo and Pier Giorgio is how concretely they represent a life of heroic sanctity for boys like you. You love scrambling up hills and hanging with friends. You love computer games and soccer. They are a great addition to your menagerie of favorite saints. Among the martyrs, archangels, and scholars of old, they show you that sainthood is not in the past or in the hinterlands of life: it can be found at home, among our loved ones, our friends, and our daily tasks.
Further, the stories of these young men help me visualize more clearly what I desire for you—a life full of the things you love, but most of all, a life "outstanding in holiness," as one of the Eucharistic prefaces says of the saints. I hope—as many mothers around the world now do—that these young saints are a testament that a life of heroic virtue is within reach for you every single day. This is especially important now, in a culture where young men are not thriving.
Yet as a mother, the main thing that the canonization brings up is the prospect of losing you. Fifteen and twenty-four years old. Scrolling through news of the canonization, I was shocked by a recent photo of Carlo's mother next to his body, which is on display beneath glass at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Assisi. To have lost your son, and yet to have him so near, looking not so different as when you last poked your head into his room to say goodnight and found him sleeping: the prospect is gut-wrenching. The Gospel reading on the Sunday of the canonization Mass drove it home: without giving up father or mother or sister or brother, you cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26).
It is as though Antonia Salzano lives three Marian realities at once: the Nativity, the tender love of mother and son; the Pieta, the mother in grief; the Resurrection—or something like it—the encounter with her son's body knowing that it will be glorified. She is at peace with it, as she has said in many interviews. She understands Paul's words from the second reading at the canonization Mass: "Perhaps this is why he was away from you for a while, so that you may have him back forever" (Phil 1:15).
But where she is at peace, I am not. I struggle with the reality that motherhood consists of loving one's children from within the juxtaposed realities of the manger and at the Cross. My children are a memento mori. Enfolded within the earth-shattering, profound love I have for you is a grief that you will suffer and die. This emerges at surprising moments, like when you rush down the stairs, excited to show me you've learned to snap your fingers, or when you show so much delight at packing your suitcase for a trip to Granny's. The quotidian tugs on the eternal. And the only way to evade despair, at least that I have found, is to muster with the help of grace a feeble gratitude amid the aching swells of love.
The joy of the nativity always comes with the grief of the Cross, a grief which is tempered by the hope of the Resurrection. I am reminded of a hymn the Notre Dame Folk Choir would sing at the end of the Christmas season, foreshadowing of the Paschal Mystery even as the wise men took their place next to the manger:
Come down, all you holy angels
sing round him with your golden harps
for someday he will die to save this world
O, poor little Jesus.
The witness of Carlo and Pier Giorgio may be inspiring for you, but it is challenging for me. It challenges the tidy separation I maintain between this world and the next, between the mundane tasks of motherhood and the hope of sharing eternal life with you. I have brought you into existence with the help of God, but I am not the author of your very being. I am an instrument in your journey. Your ultimate happiness is contingent upon your assent to God's grace and to God's overwhelming generosity in offering salvation to all of us. And at any moment, just as the Lord gave me to you, the Lord could take you away. This truth, expressed in Scripture by the grieving father Job, came to Antonia's mind during Carlo's last days in the hospital, and it comes to my mind now.
But there is good news, here. There is an invitation to hand you over to divine Providence and live my vocation more confidently. There are days when it feels like everything good you are has come about in spite of me rather than because of my help. Dinner is frozen pizza. I treat you as I swore I never would when you misbehave. I stare at my phone rather than your face until you ask me from across the table, "Mom, how was your day?" Walter Ciszek's maxim, "Give God your lousy best" comes to mind.
Yet I can be at peace knowing that part of the beautiful mystery of God's divine plan is bringing about his kingdom through his wounded creatures. I am not the author of your very being, and this is good news. Just as Carlo and Pier Giorgio inspired an increase in the faith of their parents, you inspire me to place my love for you in God's hands. This frees me to be the mom God has called me to be, an instrument, to be sure, but an instrument—I hope—of the Holy Spirit. This frees me from treating you as a product I must perfect, and helps me treat you, as Holly Taylor Cooman recently wrote, as "a person to be encountered, loved, and accompanied."
And so, I will praise you for very mediocre artwork. I will receive with gladness the rocks and flower heads you find for me. I will make you put down your fork to fold your hands for prayer before meals. I will forget the complaints of my touched-out body and receive your catastrophic hugs. I will pray for you—the name of one boy for each of the first three Hail Mary beads on the rosary. (Yes, John, I pray for you first.) I will say I love you. I will say I'm sorry. Over and over.
My sons, remember the last lines of Pope Leo XIV's homily at the canonization mass of Saints Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati. Do not squander your lives. Direct them to heaven and make them masterpieces. I will be there to pray for you and encourage you.
