I want to tell you about a walk through the streets of Milan at midnight.

A walk I took 20 years ago with a 14-year-old boy carrying a candle and what he said to me that I have never been able to unhear.

It was Easter Sunday of 2006, April 16th, 6 months almost to the day before Carlo died.

He had not yet been diagnosed with leukemia.

That would come in the weeks following, arriving with the sudden, terrible efficiency of something that had already its mind.

That night, walking home from the Easter vigil through the quiet streets of Milan, he was still fully himself, healthy, serious, carrying his candle with the comfortable familiarity of a boy who had been doing this his whole life.

I was the one who started it.

I said something I had said before, many Easter nights, with genuine enthusiasm and no particular depth.

And Carlo stopped walking, turned to look at me, and said, with the specific gentleness he had for moments when he was about to tell me something I needed to hear and wouldn’t enjoy hearing, “Mama, with all due respect, that’s not quite true.

” What followed was 28 minutes of walking slowly through empty streets in the middle of the night while my 14-year-old son taught me what Easter actually means.

Not the version I had absorbed across 38 years of cultural Catholicism, the real thing.

The thing that is, when you look at it directly, considerably more demanding and considerably more honest than the version I had been celebrating.

I have thought about that conversation every Easter since, including the Easters after he was gone, especially those when his absence made every word he said that night carry a weight it didn’t quite have when he was still alive to say more words.

I want to share it with you now because I think he was right and because I think a lot of us, a lot who love their faith and celebrate Easter with genuine joy, are celebrating something slightly different from what Easter actually is.

And Carlo, with the unceremonious directness of a boy who loved truth more than he loved comfortable feelings, would not have approved of leaving that uncorrected.

My name is Antonia Acutis.

I am 58 years old.

I am Carlo’s mother and this is the story of the Easter that changed how I understood everything that came after it.

I need to tell you first what Easter meant to me before that walk.

Not because my previous understanding was stupid, [music] it wasn’t, but because the gap between what I believed and what Carlo showed me is the entire content of what I’m trying to share and the gap only makes sense if you understand where I was starting from.

I was raised Catholic in the way that many Italian women of my generation were raised Catholic, >> [music] >> structurally, culturally, with the feast days and the devotions and the specific aesthetic pleasures of the liturgy woven into the fabric of the year in a way that felt beautiful and complete and not particularly requiring of examination.

I believed, I went to mass, I prayed in my way.

I found the Easter liturgy genuinely moving, the darkness, the fire, the Exsultet, the Alleluia returning after weeks of silence, the sense of cosmic triumph that the church manages to stage with extraordinary skill every year in the space between Saturday night and Sunday morning.

And my summary of what that triumph meant was approximately what I said to Carlo on the walk home that night, something like, “Christ is risen.

All sins are forgiven.

All humanity is saved.

It is the happiest day of the year.

” This felt true to me.

It felt like the right register for Easter, expansive, universal, overflowing.

God’s love winning completely.

Everyone included in the victory.

The darkness defeated for good.

Carlo stopped walking when I said it.

He was carrying his candle, still lit somehow, in the mild April night air.

And when he stopped, he turned toward me with the expression I had come to recognize over 14 years of his increasingly theological childhood.

Not argumentative, not superior, something closer to troubled.

The look of someone who has just heard something said incorrectly about something that matters deeply and is trying to decide how to address it without causing unnecessary pain.

“Mama,” he said, “with all due respect, that’s not quite true.

” “What isn’t true? That Christ rose?” “Of course he rose, but the other parts, that all sins are automatically forgiven, that all humanity is automatically saved.

” He paused.

“That’s a half-truth and a half-truth is more dangerous than a complete falsehood because it sounds right enough that people stop examining it.

” We started walking again.

He was quiet for a moment, choosing his approach.

“When you say all humanity is saved like that, without qualifications, you make it sound like Easter is a universal amnesty, like Christ rose from the dead and now everyone, regardless of what they believe or how they live or whether they repent or not, is automatically included in the salvation.

Like the

resurrection is a policy that applies to everyone whether they want it or not.

” “But God loves everyone,” I said.

“Jesus died for everyone.

” “Yes, absolutely.

Jesus died for everyone.

God loves everyone, but God’s love doesn’t force salvation on anyone.

It offers salvation to everyone and an offer can be accepted or refused.

He let that sit for a moment.

“Think of it this way.

Easter is like a prison door being opened.

Christ, through his death and resurrection, opened the door.

He defeated the forces that held us captive, sin, death, separation from God.

The door is open.

Salvation is available, but each prisoner still has to choose to walk out of the cell.

And if some don’t choose to walk out, then they stay.

Not because the door is locked, not because God doesn’t want them free, but because they prefer the cell.

Maybe they’ve gotten used to it.

Maybe they love the chains.

Maybe they’re too proud to admit they need to be freed.

” I was quiet for a moment.

We passed under a street lamp and I watched our shadows stretch ahead of us on the pavement.

“But Carlo, God is merciful.

Surely in the end he saves everyone eventually.

” Carlo stopped again.

He looked at me with the patient intensity he reserved for his most important points.

“Mama, mercy is not the same as overriding free will.

God loves you too much to force you to love him back.

If you choose to reject him, he will respect that choice because genuine love always respects freedom.

It has to.

A love that forces its object to love in return isn’t love, it’s coercion.

And God is not a coercer.

But who would consciously reject God? Many people in three specific ways.

” He held up a finger as we walked.

“First, those who know the truth but consciously reject it because they love their preferred sin more than they love God.

I’m not talking about weak people who fall repeatedly but genuinely repent and keep trying.

I’m talking about people who deliberately choose sin, rationalize that choice into something comfortable, and then resent anyone who suggests they should change.

They’ve made their peace with the cell.

” A second finger.

“Second, modern Pharisees.

People who go to mass, say the rosary, do all the correct devotions, but never actually let Christ change them >> [music] >> because they love their self-image as a religious person more than they love actual holiness.

They use faith as performance instead of transformation.

They look exactly right from the outside while their interior is closed shut.

” He paused.

“And third, and this one might be the most dangerous because it sounds like grace but it isn’t, those who presume salvation without conversion.

People who say, ‘Jesus loves me as I am, so I don’t need to change anything.

‘ Who transform grace into a license to stay in sin.

Who treat divine mercy as an unconditional guarantee that exempts them from repentance and conversion.

” Real quick, if you want to go deeper with Carlo after this, I put together a 7-day guide, just 5 minutes daily.

That’s it.

Links in the description.

Anyway, back to where I was.

We walked in silence for a little while.

I was processing all three categories and feeling the uncomfortable recognition that each of them was, in some measure, visible in my own religious life if I looked honestly.

The way I had sometimes used faith as comfort rather than allowing it to challenge me.

The way I had occasionally treated confession as a reset button rather than a genuine commitment to change.

The way I had vague, warm feelings about God’s universal love that conveniently never required me to examine whether my love for God was equally warm and equally real.

“So, you’re saying Easter doesn’t save these people?” “I’m saying Easter offers salvation to all of them, but it saves only those who genuinely accept that offer through real repentance, living faith, continuous conversion.

He looked at me.

Jesus’ first public words in Mark’s gospel aren’t relax, everyone’s going to be fine.

They’re repent and believe the good news.

The joy of Easter is real, but it’s the joy of possibility, not the joy of automatic universal guarantee.

But that sounds harder, more demanding than the version I had.

Yes, the real thing usually is.

He said this without any satisfaction in it, just the matter-of-factness of someone reporting an accurate measurement.

But Mama, I’m not telling you this to make you sad.

I’m telling you because truth is kinder than comfortable falsehood.

A doctor who tells a patient they’re fine when they’re not is not being kind, they’re being cowardly.

The church has sometimes been cowardly about this, giving people the easier version that feels like love, but actually does them no favors.

We were approaching our building.

The streets were completely empty around us.

That specific midnight emptiness of Milan, a city that goes genuinely [music] quiet in the small hours in a way that makes you feel like you have it entirely to yourself.

The candle in Carlo’s hand was still going, barely.

“Mama,” he said, “celebrate Easter with joy, but sober joy.

Joy that knows the door is open, but that you still have to choose to walk through it.

Joy mixed with urgency.

Urgency to choose well while there’s still time.

And how does one choose well? What does that actually look like?” He thought for a moment.

“Genuine repentance, not just feeling bad about sins, actually wanting to change, living faith, not performed faith, trusting God completely rather than using him as a comfort blanket, and continuous conversion.

Every day dying a little more to yourself and rising a little more in Christ.

” He looked at the candle.

The Paschal candle gets lit from the new fire every year.

It’s not lit once and done.

The light has to be renewed.

That’s what conversion is, not a single decision, but a daily renewal of the choice to let God [music] have you.

We went inside.

I lay awake for a long time that night, turning the conversation over.

Finding in every direction I turned it something uncomfortable that I hadn’t wanted to see.

The uncomfortable thing at the center of it all was this.

I had been using Easter as an anesthetic, not consciously, not cynically, but the everyone is saved, all sins forgiven, universal triumph of love version of Easter was doing a specific emotional job for me.

It was allowing me to feel the joy of the resurrection without the corresponding weight of what the resurrection actually asks.

The door is open, yes, but walking through it requires the death that precedes rising.

The self that has to go before the new self can come.

The repentance that isn’t performance, but genuine reorientation.

I had been celebrating the sunrise without wanting to acknowledge the night that preceded it.

Carlo died on October 12th of that year, 6 months after that walk.

He died at 15 years old in a hospital in Monza, having offered his suffering for the Pope and for the church.

He had lived in those 15 years exactly the daily dying and rising he described on that Easter walk.

The conversion that isn’t one decision, but 10,000.

The faith that isn’t performance, but complete, unspectacular, habitual orientation toward God in every ordinary moment.

At the computer, playing video games, walking to mass, helping someone on the street, eating dinner with his parents, and stopping to correct something that wasn’t quite theologically accurate because truth mattered to him.

And half-truths troubled him even when they came wrapped in genuine happiness.

He chose every day, not dramatically, with the quiet, determined consistency of someone who had found what he was for and saw no reason to do anything other than pursue it wholeheartedly.

And at the end, he passed through the door he had always known was open.

I have thought about that every Easter since, about the sober joy he described, joy that contains urgency, that knows the door is open, and knows that walking through it costs something, and chooses the cost gladly because what’s on the other side is worth it.

I celebrate Easter differently now, not with less joy, with more actually, because [music] joy that knows what it’s celebrating is more real than joy that’s skating on pleasant sentiment.

The joy of Easter is the joy of genuine possibility, of a door genuinely open, of death genuinely defeated, of the specific, astonishing truth that the worst thing that can happen to you, losing everything, being completely broken, dying, is not the last word.

The resurrection says it isn’t, and that is worth celebrating with the full register of human joy, but also with the clear-eyed acknowledgement that the door requires a choice, that the joy and the urgency belong together, that Jesus’ first words, repent and believe, are not the fearful threat of a punishing God, but the loving insistence of someone who knows what the cell costs and wants you free of it.

Pasqua salva chi vuol esser salvo.

Carlo told me that night, “Easter saves those who want to be saved.

” He wanted to be.

He showed me what wanting looks like, not in feeling, but in daily, unremarkable choice.

In the mass that was not performance, but genuine encounter.

In the confession that was not reset button, but real examination.

In the continuous, unspectacular conversion that accumulates across 15 years into a life so oriented toward God that even death doesn’t interrupt it.

It completes it.

I want to be.

I am still learning what that means.

I think I will be learning it for the rest of my life, which is perhaps the point.

Conversion is not finished, it is ongoing.

The Paschal candle is relit from the new fire every year for a reason.

And if you are celebrating Easter today or any day, I want to offer you what Carlo offered me on that midnight walk through the streets of Milan, not a smaller joy, but a truer one.

The joy of a door genuinely open, and a choice genuinely yours, and a God who loves you too completely to make the choice for you, and who waits with the patience that only infinite love can sustain for you to want what he wants for you, which is to be free.

The door is open.

It has

been open since the morning of the third day.

It will not [music] close, but you have to want to walk through it.

Carlo did.

He did it with every step he took for 15 years through the streets of Milan and the aisles of the church and the corridors of the hospital where he died.

And he walked through the final door the same way he walked through every other one, with the quiet, deliberate certainty of someone who knew exactly where he was going and had spent his whole life choosing it.

That is the joy of Easter, sober, real, and worth every step of the choosing.