what you said today in your conference admitting God’s silence that was the first step.

Now I need to explain why that silence happened and what it means.

I’ve wanted to understand for so long.

I know you have.

And the fact that you’ve wanted to understand while simultaneously being angry about it is part of what makes this so painful.

Carlo leaned forward in his chair.

Mama, God has three specific reasons for remaining silent during our greatest suffering.

Three reasons that are all painful to accept, but all necessary to understand if you’re going to continue this ministry authentically.

Tell me, please.

Carlo took a breath, which struck me as strange since he didn’t technically need to breathe and began.

The first reason God sometimes remains silent is this.

Some prayers are so important, so consequential that God cannot answer them immediately without destroying the greater purpose he has planned.

I don’t understand.

Mama, your prayer for my healing was genuine, pure, and completely understandable.

Any mother would have prayed the same prayer.

But if God had answered that prayer, if he had healed me and I had lived to be 80 years old, millions of souls who found Jesus through my death would never have encountered him.

I felt a sharp pain in my chest.

So God chose those millions of strangers over his own mother’s plea.

No, mama.

God chose what would bring the greatest glory to him and the greatest good to the greatest number of people.

That’s what love does.

It chooses the greater good even when the immediate cost is devastating.

Carlos’s voice was gentle but firm.

Think about it.

If I’d been healed, what would have happened? I would have been grateful.

Certainly, I would have continued going to daily mass, working on my Eucharistic miracles website, living a good Christian life.

Maybe I would have become a programmer, gotten married, had children, died quietly at 80 years old, having impacted maybe a few hundred people who knew me personally.

That sounds wonderful to me.

Of course it does.

But mama, instead of that scenario, my death at 15 has led to millions of young people discovering the Eucharist.

Thousands have entered religious life because of my example.

Countless people have been healed through my intercession.

My story has spread across the globe, transcending languages and cultures because a teenage boy who loved video games and computers also loved Jesus so much he was willing to die for him.

Tears were streaming down my face.

But why did God have to be silent about it? Why couldn’t he at least comfort me, explain what he was doing? That’s the second reason, Mama, and it’s even harder to accept.

Carlos stood and walked to the window, looking out at the Barcelona streets below.

Some spiritual lessons can only be learned in complete darkness.

If God had comforted you during my illness, if he had explained his plan, if he had given you consolation and peace, you would never have developed the faith muscles you needed for this ministry.

What do you mean? Carlo turned back to face me.

Mama, think about why people listen to you.

It’s not because you have all the answers.

It’s not because your faith is perfect.

It’s because your pain is authentic.

When you speak to grieving mothers, they trust you because they can sense that you’ve been where they are.

Your authority doesn’t come from your polished words or your theological knowledge.

It comes from the rawness of your genuine suffering.

So God let me suffer to make me more effective.

God let you suffer because that suffering forged you into a vessel capable of holding other people’s pain.

Mama, if you had experienced easy comfort during my illness, you would have become one of those speakers who gives nice platitudes that don’t actually help anyone.

Instead, you became someone who can sit with people in their darkness because you’ve been in that darkness yourself.

I was sobbing now.

It was so hard, Carlo.

So unbearably hard.

I know, Mama.

I watched from heaven, and it broke my heart to see your suffering.

But I also saw what was being forged in you.

a capacity for empathy, a depth of faith, a willingness to continue trusting God even when he seemed absent.

Those qualities aren’t developed in comfort.

They’re only developed in the crucible of unanswered prayer.

You said there were three reasons.

What’s the third? Carlo came and sat on the edge of my bed, taking my hand exactly as he used to do when he was alive.

The third reason is the most painful of all, Mama.

God sometimes remains silent because certain souls need to grow through the experience of apparent abandonment.

Not every soul, only specific ones that God knows can handle it and will emerge stronger from it.

That sounds cruel, does it? Or does it sound like a loving father who trusts his child enough to let them walk through the dark forest alone because he knows they need to develop the strength that can only come from that lonely journey? Carlos squeezed my hand.

Mama, during those 90 days of silence, something profound happened in your soul.

You discovered that your faith wasn’t dependent on feeling God’s presence.

You learned that love continues even when the beloved seems absent.

You developed the kind of raw, desperate faith that can only exist in the dark night of the soul.

But I felt abandoned.

I felt like God didn’t love me.

And yet, you kept praying.

You kept going to mass.

You kept begging God for my healing even though he seemed deaf to your please.

Don’t you see? That’s the purest form of faith.

Continuing to seek God even when he seems to have disappeared.

That’s the faith of Job, of Mother Teresa in her dark night, of Jesus on the cross crying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I was quiet for a long moment, processing everything Carlo had said.

Finally, I whispered, “So all my suffering, all that silence, all that feeling of abandonment, it was intentional.

God chose it.

” Yes, mama.

God chose it because he loved you enough to transform you from a comfortable believer into a crucible of faith capable of holding the grief of millions.

He chose it because he knew you were strong enough to survive it and wise enough to eventually understand it.

He chose it because he had a mission for you that required you to be forged in fire.

How can I accept that? How can I accept that my suffering was part of God’s plan? Carlos smiled.

That warm knowing smile I’d missed so much.

You don’t have to accept it all at once, Mama, but you do have to start being honest about it.

No more pretending that God’s silence didn’t happen.

No more giving people platitudes about answered prayer when you know the truth is more complicated.

No more hiding your wound because you think showing it makes you a bad witness.

People won’t understand.

They’ll think I’m losing my faith.

Some people won’t understand.

But the people who really need your message, the people drowning in God’s silence right now, they will understand.

They will finally feel seen and heard by someone who’s been where they are.

Carlos stood up preparing to leave.

Mama, tomorrow you’re going to receive an email from a woman in India.

Her name is Priya Sharma.

She lost three children in a bus accident.

She’s been contemplating suicide because she prayed for months for God to save them and he didn’t.

When she reads about your experience of God’s silence, it will save her life.

That’s why this conversation is happening now.

How will she read about it? Because you’re going to start telling the truth, the whole truth.

Not just the comfortable parts about God’s faithfulness, but also the painful parts about his silence.

You’re going to teach people that God’s silence isn’t abandonment.

It’s a different kind of presence.

A refining presence, a forging presence, a presence that hurts like fire but produces something stronger than what existed before.

What if I’m not strong enough to do this? Carlo touched my face gently, the way he used to when I was upset, and he wanted to comfort me.

Mama, you’ve been strong enough for 17 years.

You survived my death.

You survived God’s silence.

You survived the wound of feeling abandoned while simultaneously having to teach others about divine faithfulness.

If you can survive all that, you can survive being honest about it.

When will I see you again? Every time you tell the truth about suffering, I’m there.

Every time you sit with someone in their darkness without trying to fix it, I’m there.

Every time you admit that faith is messy and painful and doesn’t always feel good, I’m there.

He moved toward the window, his form beginning to fade slightly.

And mama, one more thing.

The woman you spoke to today, Martya Rodriguez, who asked about God’s silence during her son’s illness, call her tomorrow.

Tell her everything I’ve told you tonight.

She’s going to become one of your most important partners in this new phase of your ministry.

Like, what new phase? The phase where you stop pretending and start being real.

The phase where you stop giving people easy answers and start sitting with them in hard questions.

The phase where you stop being the perfect witness and start being the wounded healer.

Carlos smile widened.

That’s the ministry that will actually change lives, mama.

Not the polished testimony, but the broken one that lets light shine through the cracks.

And with that, he was gone.

The room was dark again, silent again, empty again.

But somehow it felt less empty than it had in 17 years.

I lay awake for the rest of the night, processing everything Carlo had told me.

The three reasons for divine silence, the painful truth that my suffering had been necessary for my mission, the call to start being honest about the messiness of faith instead of presenting a sanitized version.

As dawn broke over Barcelona on December 12th, 2023, I made a decision.

I would stop lying to others and to myself.

I would start telling the whole truth about God’s silence, about unanswered prayers, about the dark night of the soul that forges authentic faith.

It would be painful.

It would be controversial.

Some people would think I was losing my faith or undermining the gospel.

But others, the ones drowning in God’s silence right now, desperately needing someone to tell them they’re not alone, they would finally feel seen.

And that I realized was worth the cost.

It’s now March 15, 205, three months after Carlo’s visit on December 12th.

The last 90 days have been the most challenging and liberating of my entire ministry.

On December 13th, 2023, the morning after Carlo appeared to me, I did two things.

First, I called Martya Rodriguez, the woman who had asked about God’s silence at the Barcelona conference.

We spoke for 2 hours.

I told her everything about the 90 days of God’s silence during Carlo’s illness.

About my 17 years of hiding that wound, about Carlo’s visit and his explanation of the three reasons for divine silence.

Marta wept.

Not tears of despair, but tears of relief.

Thank you, she kept saying.

Thank you for telling me the truth.

Thank you for not giving me easy answers.

Thank you for letting me know I’m not crazy for feeling abandoned.

Second, I opened my laptop and wrote an article titled The 90 Days God Was Silent, a confession from Carlo Audis’s mother.

In it, I detailed everything I’ve shared with you in this testimony.

The prayers that seemed to bounce off heaven’s ceiling, the bargaining and begging that produced no response, the wound of perceived abandonment that I’d carried for 17 years.

I hesitated before publishing it.

This confession would undermine my carefully constructed image as the faithful mother who’d gracefully accepted God’s will.

It would expose my doubt, my anger, my years of spiritual fraud.

It might damage Carlo’s reputation, make people question his holiness, harm the cause for his eventual canonization.

But I remembered Carlo’s words.

No more hiding your wound because you think showing it makes you a bad witness.

I published the article on December 15th, 2023.

Within 24 hours, it had been translated into 15 languages and shared millions of times across social media.

The response was overwhelming and split almost perfectly in half.

Half the responses were negative.

Some people accused me of losing my faith, of undermining Carlo’s witness, of causing scandal.

Conservative Catholic websites wrote articles criticizing my dangerous theology.

Some people even suggested that perhaps I was never as faithful as I’d claimed, that my doubt proved I was unworthy to be the mother of a blessed.

Those criticisms stung, but they didn’t surprise me.

I knew that admitting God’s silence would be controversial in certain circles.

The other half of responses, the half that mattered most, were from people drowning in their own experience of divine silence.

Grieving parents who’d prayed desperately for children’s healing and received no answer.

spouses of terminally ill partners who’d begged God for more time together.

People suffering from chronic illness who’d asked for relief and encountered only silence.

“Thank you for telling the truth,” they wrote.

“Thank you for admitting that God doesn’t always answer.

Thank you for showing that faith can coexist with feeling abandoned.

” On December 16th, exactly as Carlo had prophesied, I received an email from Priya Sharma in Mumbai, India.

She had lost three children, ages 6, 9, and 11, in a bus accident 8 months earlier.

She had been planning to commit suicide on December 15th, having lost all faith in a God who would allow such tragedy.

But on December 15th, someone shared my article with her.

She read about the 90 days of God’s silence, about my wound of abandonment, about Carlo’s explanation of why God sometimes remains silent during our greatest suffering.

and something shifted in her.

Senor Antonia, she wrote, “Your article saved my life, not because it gave me easy answers, but because it told me the truth that God’s silence doesn’t mean God’s absence.

That unanswered prayers don’t mean unheard prayers.

That the dark night of the soul is where faith is forged.

I’m not okay yet, but I’m going to keep living, and I’m going to trust that maybe somehow this darkness is part of a greater purpose I can’t yet see.

” I wept when I read her email.

This was why Carlo had appeared to me.

This was why he’d pushed me to stop pretending and start being honest.

Because the people who needed hope most weren’t the ones who wanted pretty platitudes.

They were the ones who needed someone to sit with them in the darkness and say, “I’ve been there, too, and somehow we survive.

” Over the following weeks, I received thousands of similar messages.

A man whose wife had died of cancer after years of prayer.

A woman whose son was in prison despite decades of prayers for his conversion.

A couple who’d suffered multiple miscarriages while everyone told them God would give them children when the time was right.

All of them thanking me not for easy answers, but for honest questions.

Not for theological explanations, but for authentic admission that faith is messy and God’s ways are often painful and incomprehensible.

In January 2025, Marta Rodriguez and I began collaborating on a new ministry specifically for people experiencing divine silence.

We called it the ministry of the dark night.

Inspired by St.

John of the Cross’s writings about God’s seeming absence during spiritual growth.

We don’t offer simple solutions or prosperity gospel promises.

Instead, we offer honest companionship through the darkness.

We share our stories of unanswered prayers and we teach the three reasons Carlo gave me for divine silence.

One, some prayers are too important to be answered immediately because God has a greater purpose that would be destroyed by the quick fix we’re asking for.

Two, some spiritual lessons can only be learned in complete darkness where feeling God’s absence forces us to develop faith muscles we didn’t know we needed.

Three, some souls need to grow through apparent abandonment because that experience forges a depth of faith that can’t be developed any other way.

These aren’t comfortable teachings.

They don’t make people feel better immediately, but they’re true.

And truth, even painful truth, is more healing than comfortable lies.

In February 2025, I gave a talk in Rome at a conference for bereaveved parents.

Instead of my usual polished testimony about God’s mysterious providence, I told the raw truth about the 90 days of silence.

I confessed that I’d spent 17 years lying to myself and others about having perfect faith.

I admitted that some days, even now, I’m angry at God for taking Carlo.

The response was profound.

Instead of the typical polite applause, there was a moment of stunned silence followed by dozens of people standing, many of them crying.

Not crying because I’d given them hope, but crying because I’d given them permission to be honest about their own struggles with faith.

After the talk, a priest approached me.

He was in his 60s, a professor of theology at a prominent seminary.

Senora Antonia, he said, “I need to confess something.

I’ve taught theology for 30 years, and I’ve always presented faith as if it were simple.

Just trust God.

Just accept his will.

Just pray with confidence.

” But the truth is, my own mother died of Alzheimer’s despite 5 years of daily prayers for her healing.

And I’ve never been able to reconcile God’s silence during her deterioration with what I teach about answered prayer.

Thank you for giving me permission to stop pretending.

That conversation revealed something important.

It’s not just grieving parents or suffering individuals who struggle with God’s silence.

It’s everyone.

priests, theologians, bishops, saints.

The difference is that most people hide that struggle behind theological language and spiritual platitudes.

Carlo’s mission for me, the mission he revealed on December 12th, isn’t to make people more comfortable with easy faith.

It’s to make them more honest about difficult faith.

It’s to create space for people to say, “I prayed and God didn’t answer.

” without being told they didn’t have enough faith or didn’t pray correctly.

Last week on March 8th, 2025, I returned to Barcelona, the city where my facade finally cracked.

The same conference, organizers invited me back, asking if I would speak again about suffering and hope.

This time, though, the title of my talk was learning to love the God who stays silent.

I stood before many of the same 800 people who had heard me 3 months earlier and I told them everything.

The whole truth about divine silence, about the wound I’d carried for 17 years, about Carlo’s visit and his explanation.

About the 3 months since then when I’d stopped pretending and started being real.

Marty Rodriguez was there sitting in the front row.

When I finished speaking, she stood and shared her own testimony about losing her son Pablo, about the six months of unanswered prayers, about how my honesty had given her permission to be angry at God while still loving him.

I don’t understand why God was silent.

Marta said, “I may never understand in this life, but I’ve learned that I don’t need to understand to keep trusting.

I don’t need to feel God’s presence to believe he’s there.

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