By Father Thomas Esposito, O. Cist.
Special to The Texas Catholic
On Oct. 4, the Church marks the 800th anniversary of St. Francis of Assisi’s death. One way of celebrating the great saint is to open his tomb and expose his bones for viewing and veneration, as the Franciscans did several months ago.
Catholics love a good macabre display of holiness. Halloween, after all, is nothing other than All Hallow’s Eve — the night before All Saints Day.
A less morbid way is to ask what makes St. Francis, and indeed all saints, so refreshing, so memorable, so worth celebrating centuries after their deaths.
A different saint whose mortal remains rest in Assisi has given us a splendid answer to that question. Young Carlo Acutis, whose feast day is Oct. 12, once remarked that “everyone is born an original, but many die as photocopies.” I want to make an educated guess as to what he meant.
St. Acutis, who died in 2006 at the tender age of 15, drew an analogy about holiness from the technology of our age. He saw a stunning paradox at work: In the age of self-invention, self-expression, YouTube, and the obsession with I/me/my autonomy, an epidemic of loneliness, anxiety, and sadness born of selfishness abounds. Without reference to the God in whose image we are fashioned (Gn 1:26-27), our efforts at self-determination lead us to make and define ourselves by endless photocopies of images that are not worthy of our dignity.
Every saint, by contrast, is an original, unrepeatable, beautiful gift of God. Their originality lies in their joyful desire to share the infinite love of the God in whose image they are created. The love that God is (1 Jn 4:8, 16) reveals itself most beautifully in Christ’s sacrificial gift of self on the cross. He is the original “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), yet our imitation of his love does not make of us two-dimensional reproductions, or bland photocopies. Here is another aspect of the paradox: Every saint incarnates the love of Christ in his or her own radical, unique, joyful, and original way. No two saints are identical! Love in its inexhaustibly varied forms animates them — of lady poverty, the Eucharist, the poor, the Church, one’s spouse, children, family.
In this context, a line from W.H. Auden’s “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratio” is fitting. On the lips of Simeon, who rejoices to behold the infant Jesus after decades of patiently waiting for consolation (see Lk 2:25-35), Auden places a reflection on the freedom given to us by the Christ child: “for the course of History is predictable in the degree to which all men love themselves, and spontaneous in the degree to which each man loves God and through Him his neighbor.”
Selfish love is predictable. It reproduces only phony photocopies of cheap thrills, conformity to ever-changing secular norms, and a desperation to make oneself original that requires an exhausting search for endless novelty and attention. Such photocopies are printed with disappearing ink, but that is perhaps the best-case result; at worst, selfish love simply destroys, whether slowly or immediately, both bodies and souls.
But the saints and the love that animates them are always spontaneous. In ever new ways, they radiate joyfully the divine light in every generation. Sts. Francis of Assisi and Carlo Acutis, to name only two, testify that the quest for holiness — that is, of purifying the image of God in them rather than glorifying the ego-idol of their own fashioning — is far more exciting than anything that begins and ends with the self. Genuine self-expression creates the original, the saint within the communion of saints, that God desires each of us to be.
Father Thomas Esposito, O. Cist., is a monk at Our Lady of Dallas Cistercian Abbey and teaches in the theology department at the University of Dallas.
Cutline for featured image: A tapestry depicting St. Carlo Acutis hangs from the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica during a canonization Mass at the Vatican Sept. 7, 2025. (LOLA GOMEZ/Catholic News Service)
