Lay holiness?

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

 

This weekend two young Roman Catholics will be canonized by Pope Leo XIV (Canonization of Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati). Pier Giorgio Frassatti, an Italian Dominican layman who lived in the first quarter of the 20th century. The other, Carlo Acutis, the so-called “first millennial saint.” Each reveals not only l'air du temps of each century, but rather raise the question of the model of Church that we urgently need to present in our times of global catastrophe.

Since the end of the 19th century, the Roman Catholic Church, especially in Europe, has sought to listen to the working class and maintain contact with the population produced by the Industrial Revolution. The social teaching of the papal magisterium—since Pope Leo XIII and his Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum until the current pontiff Leo XIV, who chose his name for that reason, displayed an urban pastoral approach typical of the time to walk with that suffering sector of the people of God.

Catholic Action would be a lay response, supported by groups of bishops in countries such as Belgium and France, to such challenges. The worker priests (Worker Priests: The Church's Commitment to the Working World) were another praiseworthy page in this history, where it is worth remembering the accompaniment of the Dominican theologian Marie-Dominique Chenu and the subsequent infamous suppression of the movement by Pope Pius XII. The influence of Catholic Action would reach Latin America with its see-judge-act methodology, later inspiring liberation theology in Peru, Brazil and other countries in the region, as Agenor Brighenti has carefully studied in recent years (The ver-julgar-agir method).

One hundred years ago, a young Dominican layman from Piedmont (Pier Giorgio Frassati OP), close to the miners in his land and a mountaineer by passion, was the fruit of that ecclesial sensitivity of the time that would bear fruit in later decades in pastoral experiences in the rest of Europe and Latin America, with the pastoral movements of insertion in popular environments, especially the working world and indigenous peoples. Son of a famous journalist who was the owner of The StampPier Giorgio Frassati used to combine his political activism in the Italian Popular Party with readings of Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena, accompanied by climbs in the Alps with a club of friends and days of Eucharistic adoration in which he unfolded his interior life. A figure of his time, Pier Giorgio is today claimed by the Roman Catholic Church as a youthful lay saint, whose life ended abruptly at the age of 24 due to fulminant poliomyelitis probably contracted through his apostolate to the poor of Turin, leaving a spiritual imprint on the pastoral youth movements of a century ago.

The other young lay saint is Carlo Acutis, an Italian born in London, devoted to the Eucharist and very active on social media. He lived as a teenager focused on spreading the word about Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions. After his death from leukemia at the age of fifteen, he became a symbol for today's "Catholic influencers," but with a more devotional tone than the social and political one like his fellow canonizer. A few months ago, I received Carlo's relics along with the youth ministry group of the Parish of Santa Rosa de Lima in Mexico City, founded by the Dominican friars almost a hundred years ago. This was an initiative of the Archdiocese of Mexico to commemorate the Jubilee of Youth (A faith that never ages: Rome, 25 years after the Jubilee of Youth with John Paul II) convened by Pope Francis and carried out by Pope Leo XIV. I was struck by the low attendance of young people from this hipster area of the city, with the presence of some devout young people with very pious traits and little social sensitivity. The rosary prayer prepared by the local youth group in the tradition of Dominican spirituality meditated on the sorrowful mysteries of Christ's passion, associating them with the cry of today's youth in this neighborhood of Mexico City: gentrification, insecurity, violence against women, unemployment, and drug abuse as wounds of Christ's body today. It was an attempt to connect the tradition of the rosary with the lives of people today. The small community of older adults gathered there prayed in amazement, following the lead of the young people, and then returned to their traditional devotions, meditating on Christ's life in his passion and death. At the end, a few young people from other parishes gave a brief workshop on the millennial saint, urging the use of social media as a new place to proclaim Christ and promote the adoration of the Eucharist in communities, along with the values of the Gospel.

 

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I had already encountered this new generation of young traditionalist Catholics in Europe and the United States, among lay people, Dominicans, and Jesuits, among the religious orders and congregations recognized as promoters of the conciliar renewal of Vatican II. Their interests seem retrograde to me at first, although later I try to get closer to those generations and discover in them an inner beauty, mixed with naiveté and fear of getting lost in the labyrinth of pluralism. They seek identities that give them certainty. Religiously, they love the ancient Latin culture of medieval Christianity, above all, less so that of the Greek patristic era. They are enraptured by Gregorian chant and the Summa of Theology of Thomas Aquinas and other medieval masters, but without understanding their method open to conversation with pagan philosophers, nor following scholastic logical thought. They are fascinated by conspicuous signs of belief, such as the religious habit, the liturgical veil, and receiving communion by kneeling with great devotion, but clumsily because they do so as if they were newborn giraffes.

Despite their intense devotion, they are indifferent to social issues as a spiritual and theological context. Talking about Gaza in a sermon seems like ideology to them. Not to mention inviting unmarried couples to the Eucharistic table, much less welcoming the community of sexual diversity at Mass. They deem such practices a deviation from Church doctrine. These younger generations of Catholic laypeople seek to return to the doctrinal Church, like that of the Council of Trent and Vatican I, without fully understanding the meaning of the conciliar spirit that inspired Pope Benedict XVI to convene Vatican II.

 

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And I wonder then what models of Church are urgently needed today for a laboratory city like Mexico City and so many others around the world. It's about responding to a range of youth identities where it's a challenge to create spaces to invite them to look at one another, almost impossible to welcome them in a single liturgical celebration. I remember that my generation still dreamed of "taking Paradise by storm" through a commitment to justice and peace, with universal human rights as a sign of the new times. This led us to a university ministry at the CUC in the 1980s focused on a liberating Church.

Something that seems outdated in this era of deglobalization and the expansion of war ministries, military drone invasions, and the cynicism of capitalism in its expansionist phase of obscene forced colonization. The perverse use of religion, as we see today in Palestine with the Israeli government and its allies around the world justifying their genocidal actions in the Bible, seems to leave young Catholics today indifferent, absent from the protests in the streets and squares of the world against this manipulation of faith.

What secular saints does humanity need today amidst the ruins of our civilization? Frassati or Acutis. The young mountaineer close to the miners or the saint. millennial of Eucharistic adoration as a “highway to heaven.”

I think neither one nor the other, because both were children of their time. Today I see a new generation of young people passionate about Christ as Messiah and universal brother, whom they recognize for his exceptional inclusive love of the just and sinners that arises from their intimate experience of communion with his AbbaYoung people who are simultaneously touched by the teachings of the Dalai Lama and Tich Nath Han, or by the Zen meditation masters they have encountered at retreats in diverse spiritual traditions.

Young lay people who live holiness in their eroticized and loving bodies, unafraid to explore different modes of femininity and masculinity, of biological or adoptive fatherhood and motherhood, wrapped in the love of Christ and passionate about serving his wounded body.

Millennials who are not tasteless influencers who reproduce on social media the same things they heard in their parish groups, but who invent "blessed blends" of narrative theologies close to the discarded, crossing the peripheries, weaving bonds of life, empathy and political-spiritual solidarity. Lay holiness as the new generation of young people from the Ecclesial Base Communities of Latin America and the Caribbean (Blessed Mixture. Narrative Theology of Our America) that reinvents that old method of see-judge-act with a narrative theology on the peripheries of society, with compassionate imagination, following in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth and his messianic community.

Perhaps today, as daughters and sons of uncertain times, lay holiness is experiencing a collapse of religious institutions and the invention of other ways of worshipping the loving presence of Divinity, not only in the temple, but also in the community that, animated by its faith, seeks to save a polluted river or a dying lake. Youth communities climb the volcanoes of Mesoamerica or the Andean mountain range, with its endangered glaciers, as paths to ecological spirituality.

Initiatives that seek to worship Christ in his wounded body today.

Lay holiness which, after all, is the life of the Ruah divine who makes all things new from the rubble of the crumbling world.

 

Mexico City, September 6, 2025