My name is Maestro Renato Esposito.

I am 78 years old.

I played the organ at the Church of Santangelo in Milan for 41 years.

I want to tell you about the morning of October 12th, 2006.

Not because it was dramatic, not because it was loud or spectacular, or the kind of thing that announces itself as extraordinary, but because it was the quietest thing I have ever experienced in 41 years of filling that church with sound.

And because the quiet was not empty.

That is the whole story in a way.

The quiet was not empty.

But let me begin at the beginning because the beginning is Carlo Acutis and Carlo Acutis requires a proper beginning.

I have been playing organ since I was 9 years old.

My teacher was a Benedicting monk named Brother Anne Selmo who had the patience of someone who understood that time moves differently when you are learning to listen.

He taught me that the organ is not an instrument you play.

It is an instrument you breathe through.

The sound comes from air, literally from air moving through pipes.

And the organist’s job is to shape that air into something that lifts the space it inhabits.

I have been lifting spaces with air for 69 years.

I know what a church sounds like when the music is working and when it is not.

I know the acoustic of Santangelo the way a sailor knows the sea.

Every current, every depth, every place where the sound pools, and every place where it rises.

I sat at that organ bench for 41 years.

through more masses than I can count, through weddings and funerals and feast days and ordinary Sundays.

Through the Second Vatican Council’s changes to the liturgy, which required me to learn an entirely new repertoire in my 40s, through the installation of a new organ in 1989, which I helped select and which I played for the first time on Christmas Eve with my hands shaking.

Through all of it, the music never stopped.

Not once in 41 years did my hands leave the keys in the middle of a mass until October 12th, 2006.

Carlo Acutis came to Santangelo regularly.

I first noticed him in the spring of 2006, which is to say about 6 months before his death, though I did not know then that a death was coming.

He was not difficult to notice, not because he was disruptive.

He was the opposite of disruptive.

He came to early mass before school, sat in the third pew from the front on the left side, and was still in a way that stood out among the general restlessness of young people in churches.

But there was something beyond the stillness.

When I played, I watched the congregation the way organists do, peripherally, from above and behind, through the mirror mounted at the side of the loft that lets me see the altar and the nave without turning my head.

I watched faces the way you watch water for movement for the places where something is happening beneath the surface.

Most people in a church are present in body and somewhere else in mind.

This is not a criticism.

It is the ordinary condition of human attention.

Carlo was entirely present, not in the effortful way of someone forcing themselves to focus, in the natural way of someone for whom this was simply where they wanted to be.

After mass one morning in April, I came down from the loft and he was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

Maestro Esposito, he said he knew my name.

I did not know his yet.

Yes, I said.

The bark this morning, he said, the prelude in E minor.

You held the final chord two beats longer than the score indicates.

I looked at him.

You know that piece? I said, I have listened to 12 recordings, he said simply.

Your interpretation is the one I would have chosen.

The extra two beats let the sound die in the room rather than cutting it off.

It’s more honest.

I stared at this boy, 15 years old, in his school uniform, backpack on his shoulder, discussing organ interpretation with the particularity of someone who had spent years thinking about it.

What’s your name? I asked.

Carlo, he said.

Carlo Acutus.

We talked for 20 minutes in the Narthx of St.

Angelo that April morning about Bach and Bookster Huda and the particular challenges of lurggical organ playing, the need to serve the mass rather than perform for it, the difference between filling a space and overwhelming it.

He had opinions, precise, well-informed, genuinely considered opinions.

I left that conversation thinking, “That is a remarkable boy.

” Over the following months, we spoke occasionally after early mass.

He came two or three times a week.

He always sat in the same pew.

He always listened to the music with that quality of entire presence.

In September 2006, he looked thinner.

I noticed but did not ask.

It was not my place.

In early October, he missed several mornings.

This was unusual.

On October 8th, he came for what I did not know at the time would be the last time.

After mass, he climbed the stairs to the loft.

He had never done this before.

He stood at the top of the stairs and looked at the organ for a moment.

Then he looked at me.

Maestro, he said, I want to ask you something.

Of course, I said, when you play for a funeral mass, he said, what do you choose for the recessional when the family is walking out? I thought about it.

It depends on the family, I said.

Some want something traditional.

Some want something that speaks to the person who has died.

I try to find something that honors both.

He nodded slowly.

If you were choosing for someone who loved the Eucharist above everything, he said, “What would you play?” I looked at him.

the thinness, the question, the quality of stillness around him that had always been there but was now something else.

Something more concentrated, more final.

Fedor, I said, the Tarta from the fifth symphony.

It’s celebratory.

It sounds like arrival, not departure.

Carlo smiled.

That’s exactly right, he said.

That’s exactly what it should sound like.

He went back down the stairs.

I sat at the organ for a long time after he left.

October 12th, 2006.

The early morning mass at Santangelo began at 6:30.

I was at the organ bench at 6:15 as always, running through the opening voluntary, warming my hands, settling into the particular quality of attention that 41 years had taught me to find before a mass begins.

The congregation that morning was small, perhaps 20 people, mostly elderly regulars who came every day regardless of weather.

Mrs.

Columbbo in her usual place near the front, or Senor Bianke with his rosary, the small faithful group who filled the front pews, and whose faces I could have drawn from memory.

The mass began.

I played the entrance hymn, the kirier, the Gloria.

I played well that morning.

I remember this clearly.

The acoustics were good.

The overnight temperature had left the air in the church at exactly the right humidity, which affects the organs voicing in ways that only an organist would notice or care about.

The instrument was singing.

We came to the liturgy of the word, the readings, the psalm, the gospel.

Father Benedetto gave a brief homaly, then the offetery.

I began the offetry piece, a setting of the a Maria Schubert’s arranged for organ.

Quiet, meditative, the kind of music that creates space for prayer rather than filling it.

I was four measures into the piece when it happened.

My hands stopped, not because I decided to stop, not because I made a choice or lost my place or had any conscious intention of stopping.

My hands simply left the keys.

The way your hand pulls back from a hot surface before your mind has registered the heat.

Automatic, instinctive, entirely outside my control.

The music stopped.

In 41 years, the music had never stopped.

The church went absolutely silent.

And in that silence, and this is the part I have tried to describe to three people in 18 years and have not found adequate words for, in that silence, the space filled, not with sound, not with anything I could point to or measure or ask anyone else to confirm, with present, the particular quality of presence that I had felt in that church on certain extraordinary occasions over 41 years, Christmas Eve, with a full congregation singing the Easter vigil when the lights come on after the darkness.

The rare moments when everything aligns and the music and the liturgy and the space and the people become briefly and completely one thing, but stronger than any of those, much stronger, as though the church itself had inhaled.

It lasted perhaps 30 seconds.

Then my hands returned to the keys.

I completed the Ave Maria.

The mass continued.

After mass, I sat in the loft for a long time.

Father Benedetto came up the stairs.

He looked at me with an expression I recognized.

Renato, he said quietly.

Did you feel it? Yes, I said.

Carlo Acutus died this morning, he said.

His mother called the rectory.

It was just after 6 while we were preparing for mass.

I looked at the nave below, the empty pews, the altar, the candle still burning.

The music stopped, I said.

Father Benedetto looked at the organ.

I know, he said.

I heard the silence.

We all heard the silence.

He paused.

I’ve been a priest for 28 years, Renato.

I have never heard a silence like that in a church.

It wasn’t empty, I said.

No, he said it was not empty.

Carlo’s funeral was on October 15th.

I played Wedor’s Tarta for the recessional.

It was the first time I had played it at a funeral.

It sounded like a rival, exactly as Carlo had said it should.

I have played it at every funeral where the family has given me latitude to choose since then.

not as a ritual, not as a habit, as a reminder.

That what sounds like an ending is sometimes something else entirely.

That silence is not always absence.

That a boy who spent his morning sitting still in the third pew, listening with his entire presence to the music filling the space above him, knew something about departure that I am still learning.

I retired from Santangelo in 2015, after 41 years.

On my last Sunday, I played the full mass, all the music, the voluntary, the hymns, the offetry, the communion piece, the recessional, with the particular attention of someone doing something for the last time and wanting to do it completely.

The church was full.

Word had spread among the regular congregation that it was my final mass.

Mrs.

Columbbo was in her usual place, Senor Biani with his rosary, though he was much older now and moved more slowly.

Faces I had watched from above for four decades.

After the recessional, [clears throat] I sat at the bench for a long moment.

I looked at the nave through the mirror.

The congregation was still there, not moving toward the exits, simply sitting.

And I thought about a boy who had sat in the third pew from the front on the left side and talked to me about Bach and Bookster Huda, and the extra two beats at the end of the prelude in E minor, who had climbed these stairs one last time, and asked what music I would choose for someone who loved the Eucharist above everything, who had known.

I played one more piece.

Weedor’s Tarta.

Not for any lurggical reason for Carlo.

My hands are slower now.

Arthritis has limited what I can play.

But I still go to early mass at Santangelo most mornings.

I sit in the third pew from the front on the left side.

Carlo’s pew.

I listen to whoever is playing the organ.

a younger woman now, talented with her own interpretations and her own way of lifting the space with air.

And sometimes in the middle of a piece I feel that particular quality of presence that I felt on the morning of October 12th, 2006.

Not as strongly, not with the same overwhelming completeness, but there recognizable.

The same quality underneath, as though the church remembers, as though something that passed through that space on an October morning 18 years ago, left a trace in the stone and the wood and the air and the pipes.

Carlo Acutis was beatatified on October 10th, 2020.

I was at Santangelo for the ceremony and they showed it on a screen in the nave.

A small congregation gathered to watch together.

When it was over, I climbed the stairs to the loft for the first time in 5 years.

I sat at the bench.

I placed my hands on the keys, and I played the prelude in E minor, the one from that April morning in 2006.

I held a final chord two beats longer than the score indicates.

The sound died in the room rather than cutting off.

more honest.

That is what he said.

More honest.

He was right.

Then he is right.

Still, the most honest thing I know how to say is this.

On the morning of October 12th, 2006, at approximately 6:04 in the morning, my hands left the keys in the middle of a mass for the first time in 41 years.

And the silence that followed was the fullest silence I have ever heard.

It was not empty.

It has never been empty since.