I’ve been talking about Carlo publicly for almost 20 years now.

I’ve given interviews, spoken at conferences, stood in front of tens of thousands of people in Aisi and Rome and S.

Paulo in Manila.

And I’ve shared things about my son that still make me cry every single time.

His love for the Eucharist.

The way he’d come home from school and go straight to adoration before even dropping his backpack.

The computer he used to catalog eucharistic miracles from around the world, sitting there in his bedroom, surrounded by action figures and video games, completely absorbed in something that most grown theologians hadn’t even attempted.

I’ve talked about all of it openly, gratefully, but there’s one conversation I’ve kept almost entirely to myself.

Not because it’s painful, though it is in the way that all memories of Carlo are painful now, the good ones especially.

I kept it to myself because for years I wasn’t sure I was ready to admit what it revealed about me, about the kind of person I was before Carlo showed me something I didn’t want to see.

He was 14 years old.

It was August of 2005.

We were having dinner, the three of us, me, Andrea, and Carlo in our apartment in Milan.

It was a Tuesday evening, warm, the windows open, the smell of the city coming in with the breeze.

I remember that dinner so clearly because of what happened in the middle of it.

Because of what my 14-year-old son said that stopped me completely cold and made me put down the salad bowl and stare at him like he just told me something in a language I didn’t know.

He told me I was doing something wrong.

Something I’d been doing for years confidently and piously convinced it was holy.

and he explained why in 22 minutes of theological reasoning so precise, so layered, so genuinely original that I’ve spent the years since then, including now 20 years later, still unpacking what he said.

I want to share that conversation today, not because I think I deserve credit for finally telling it, but because I suspect that some of you listening right now are doing exactly what I was doing.

And someone should have told you what Carlo told me.

My name is Antonia Audis.

I’m 58 years old.

I’m Carlo’s mother.

And this is the story of the night my 14year-old son shook something loose in me that needed to be shaken.

I was born in 1968 in Milan into a family that was Catholic the way most Italian families of that era were Catholic structurally, culturally, automatically.

We went to mass on Sundays in major feasts.

We had a crucifix in every room.

My grandmother said the rosary every evening at 7:00 and the rhythm of those beads clicking against each other is one of the first sounds I remember.

It was faith as furniture, comfortable, unexamined, present.

I won’t pretend I was deeply devout as a young woman.

I was not.

I believed, but distantly.

Faith was the background noise of my life, not the signal.

I studied literature at the University of Milan.

I worked in publishing.

I’ve been a senior editor at a major publishing house for over two decades now, which means my professional life consists almost entirely of sitting with other people’s words and deciding whether they’re true, whether they’re beautiful, whether they’re worth putting into the world.

I married Andrea.

We tried for years to have children.

When Carlo was born in London in May of 1991, we were living there briefly for Andrea’s work.

I remember thinking that something had shifted in me.

Not religiously, not at first, just the animal shift of new motherhood, the sudden rearrangement of priorities that happens when someone small and helpless becomes the center of everything.

We moved back to Milan when Carlo was still an infant.

We gave him a millise childhood.

Parks, football, school friends, the particular smell of the city in autumn.

And then gradually, slowly, in a way I couldn’t have predicted or engineered, my son began to convert me.

That’s the word I use, and I use it deliberately.

Carlo converted me.

Not through argument, not through any kind of pressure or preaching, but through witness, through the sheer inexplicable gravity of his faith, which was unlike anything I’d seen in another person.

He’d been going to daily mass since he was seven.

At seven, on his own initiative, he’d asked to stop at churches when we were walking past them, not dramatically, just the way another child might ask to stop at a gelaria.

He read theological texts the way other boys read sports magazines.

By the time he was 11, he was having conversations with our parish priest that our parish priest would later describe to me, slightly dazed, as among the most interesting theological exchanges he’d had in years.

And meanwhile, I was watching this happen, and something in me was quietly waking up.

The faith I’d inherited as furniture was becoming something I was choosing because of him, because of who he was.

By 2004, I had become genuinely devout, practicing, committed, serious.

I went to mass regularly.

I prayed daily.

I developed what I thought of as a rich intercessory prayer life.

Meaning, I prayed for other people consistently, earnestly, with what I believed was real love.

And one of the people I prayed for most consistently was my friend Juliana.

Juliana Marchie and I had been friends since university.

She was is one of the best people I know.

Sharp, generous, funny, loyal in the way that only people who’ve known you through difficult decades can be loyal.

We’d been through a lot together.

Career setbacks, family crises, the particular grinding difficulty of trying to build a life in a city that doesn’t make things easy.

But Juliana was an atheist.

A convinced, considered, intellectually serious atheist.

Not hostile to religion.

She’d never mocked my faith or dismissed it.

She’d say things like, “I genuinely respect what you have, Antonia.

It’s just not something I can access.

” She’d come to Carlo’s first communion and sat in the back of the church with a kind of respectful, attentive silence.

She was not a person who needed to be argued out of belief.

She’d never had it.

For her, the universe was what it was, magnificent and indifferent, and meaning was something you made rather than found.

We talked about it over the years.

I’d tried gently to share what faith meant to me, invited her to things, given her books, a CS Lewis here, a Henry Noan there, that she accepted graciously, and read without apparent effect.

She’d always respond the same way.

I understand why this matters to you, but I just don’t feel it.

And I had decided that this was a problem I needed to solve, not consciously, not cynically, genuinely, with what I thought was love.

I cared about Juliana.

I believed in eternity.

And the combination of those two things produced in me a conviction that I needed to pray for her conversion urgently, persistently until God did something about it.

So in 2004, I launched what I can only now describe with some embarrassment as a campaign, a prayerful campaign, but a campaign nonetheless.

Daily rosary intentions directed specifically at Juliana’s conversion.

a 54-day novena, one of the most demanding Marian devotions offered entirely for her.

Candles lit at the shrine near our apartment, specific intercessions to specific saints.

I even quietly asked a contemplative convent I supported to include her in their prayers, giving them her name and describing her as a soul in need of conversion.

I was thorough.

I was committed.

I was absolutely convinced I was doing something loving and holy.

And by the time that Tuesday evening in August of 2005 arrived, I’d been doing this for over a year, and Juliana remained serenely, contentedly atheist, which frustrated me more than I was willing to admit.

Her happiness bothered me.

It seemed wrong, theologically untidy.

Shouldn’t someone without God be somehow lacking? She wasn’t.

She was thriving.

And I found myself in prayer essentially asking God to do something about her contentment to disturb it to break through it.

Which brings me to that Tuesday dinner.

I was serving salad when I mentioned it casually.

The way you mention something you assume everyone will find obvious and good.

I spent this afternoon praying for Juliana again.

I said the poor woman.

I’ve been doing the novena for her for months now.

praying that God breaks through the hardness of her heart.

Andrea nodded vaguely.

He was used to this.

Carlo was quiet.

Then I heard the sound of his fork being set down on his plate.

Not loudly, just deliberately.

And when I looked up, he was looking at me with an expression I recognized.

The one he got when he was about to say something he’d been turning over carefully and had decided needed to be said.

Mama, he said, can I say something? Of course, Amore.

With all due respect, he said it in Italian.

Kutoto respto, which in our family was understood to be genuine rather than formulaic.

You shouldn’t be doing that.

I set down the salad tongs.

Doing what? Praying.

Not praying.

Praying for someone’s conversion when they haven’t asked you to.

You’re violating her free will.

I remember the exact quality of the silence that followed.

Andrea had gone very still.

I could hear the traffic outside, a scooter somewhere on the Via dele force Armate.

Carlo, I said finally, I’m trying to save her soul.

How is that violating free will? He didn’t answer immediately.

He was 14 years old and he was clearly organizing something complex.

I watched him do it.

Even then, even in the middle of being challenged by my own adolescent son, I could see that whatever was coming had real architecture to it.

There’s a difference, he said, between praying for someone and praying against someone’s will.

I don’t follow.

When you pray for someone for their health, their safety, their peace, blessings on their life, you’re asking for things that any reasonable person would want, even if they didn’t ask directly.

You’re aligned with their genuine good.

But when you pray for someone’s conversion who has clearly said they don’t want to convert, you’re asking God to fundamentally change who they’ve chosen to be.

You’re asking him to override their free will.

And free will is the most sacred thing God gave to human beings.

But God wants everyone to be saved.

That’s in scripture.

That’s in the catechism.

Yes.

Carlo said God wants everyone to be saved, but he doesn’t force anyone.

He never has.

He could.

He’s God.

He could have made every human being believe from the moment of creation.

He chose not to.

He gave us freedom.

real freedom, and he honors that freedom even when it breaks his heart to watch us use it badly.

I looked at Andrea.

He was watching Carlo with the expression he’d been wearing with increasing frequency over the previous few years, a mixture of parental pride and something closer to awe.

So, you’re saying, I said carefully, that God won’t answer my prayers for Juliana because what? He’s protecting her right to say no.

I’m saying he might not answer them the way you expect because what you’re asking for isn’t just a blessing on her life.

You’re asking him to go into her mind, her fundamental orientation toward reality, and rearrange it without her consent because you’ve decided you know better than she does what she needs.

That landed differently than I expected.

I felt a flicker of something uncomfortable.

Think about it this way, Mama.

He leaned forward slightly, and I remember this detail clearly because it was such a Carlo gesture.

He engaged physically when an argument was important to him.

Imagine I decided that your love of opera was a waste of time, that the hours you spend at Lascala should be spent reading scripture or doing charitable works instead, and I started praying every day.

God, please take away Mama’s love of opera.

Change her tastes.

Make her stop wanting to go.

Would you want God to answer that prayer? I opened my mouth, closed it.

I would be furious, I said at last.

Yes, you’d be furious that I was trying to control your preferences through prayer.

An opera is just a preference.

Conversion is a thousand times more fundamental than that.

It’s how a person understands reality.

Whether there’s a God, whether life has transcendent meaning, whether anything is sacred, it’s the bedrock of someone’s entire inner world, and you’re asking God to demolish Juliana’s bedrock and rebuild it in the shape you prefer.

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

That’s it.

Links in the description.

Anyway, back to what I was saying.

But what’s the alternative? I asked.

I wasn’t defensive yet.

I was genuinely confused.

Do I just do nothing? Just watch her live without God and never pray for her? Of course you pray for her.

But there’s a way to pray that respects her freedom.

He was quiet for a moment.

Something like, “God, if Juliana ever chooses of her own free will to open her heart and look for you, please be there.

Please be patient with her.

Please reveal yourself in a way that makes sense to who she is.

And in the meantime, help me love her the way she is, not the way I want her to be.

I turned this over.

It felt different from what I was doing.

Quieter, less satisfying in a strange way.

That feels passive.

It’s not passive.

It’s respectful.

There’s an enormous difference.

He picked up his fork again, then set it back down.

And actually, that kind of prayer is much harder than what you’re doing now.

Why? Because what you’re doing now keeps you in control.

Juliana is your project.

You’re the believer.

She’s the lost soul.

And your job is to fix her through prayer.

You maintain a safe emotional distance.

But the other kind of prayer, the prayer that respects her freedom, requires you to genuinely accept that she might never convert and to love her anyway, completely without the agenda.

And that’s terrifying.

I remember the pasta going cold.

I remember the evening light shifting on the wall behind Carlo’s head.

I remember the strange sensation of being a grown woman being dismantled gently but thoroughly by her 14-year-old son.

Mama.

His voice was gentle now, not challenging.

How often do you pray asking God to change you versus how often do you pray asking God to change other people? The question arrived like something physical.

I felt it in my chest because, he continued, the prayer that asks God to change you is always answered if you really want to change.

God never violates your free will when you invite him to transform you.

That invitation is always honored.

But the prayer that asks God to force change in someone else against their will, that’s the prayer he often refuses.

Not because he doesn’t love them, because he loves them too much to force them.

Andrea set down his glass.

Carlo, where do you He stopped himself.

Where do you get this? He knew where.

the same place Carlo got everything.

I was looking at my son and feeling something collapse inside me that I hadn’t realized I’d been building.

The whole edifice of my prayer for Juliana, the novenas, the candles, the contemplative convent, the daily rosary petitions suddenly looked completely different from the outside.

From the outside it looked like control dressed up as devotion wrapped in the language of love.

But underneath it, control.

The refusal to accept that someone I loved had made a choice I didn’t like, and the attempt to recruit divine power to override that choice.

And consider this, Carlo said quietly.

Juliana believes in human autonomy.

In a sense, she’s praying, too, to whatever she considers ultimate, even if that’s just her own conscience.

for the freedom to live according to her own understanding of reality, for you to stop trying to convert her, for her choices to be respected.

He paused.

If both prayers go up, yours asking God to change her, hers asking for the freedom to remain herself, whose prayer do you think God honors? I didn’t answer.

I couldn’t.

The one asking for freedom, Carlos said simply.

Because God is always, always on the side of real freedom.

It’s the thing he valued enough to build into every human soul at creation, knowing it would be used against him.

He will not be the tool of someone else’s agenda for another person’s soul.

Even a loving agenda, even yours.

After dinner, I went to our bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time in the dark.

I was thinking about Luke 9.

the disciples asking Jesus if they should call down fire on the Samaritan village that had refused to receive him and Jesus turning and rebuking them.

Not arguing with the villagers, not calling fire down himself, just rebuking the impulse to force.

I’d read that passage dozens of times.

I’d never really heard it.

I was thinking about John 6 where the crowds abandon Jesus after the bread of life discourse and he turns to the twel and says will you leave too not you may not leave not I’ll make it easier for you to stay just the offer of freedom even to walk away I was thinking about revelation 3:20 behold I stand at the door and knock behold I am breaking the door down not behold I have enlisted ed your loved ones to batter the door on my behalf.

Just a knock and the door is yours to open or not open.

I thought about this for a long time and then I did something that surprised me.

I cried.

Not because I was ashamed exactly, though I was, but because of what Carlo’s question had revealed.

He’d asked how often I prayed for my own transformation versus how often I prayed for other people to change.

And the honest answer, the answer I couldn’t avoid sitting there in the dark, was that I almost never prayed for my own transformation.

My prayer life was almost entirely outward-f facing, directed at the perceived deficiencies of people around me, asking God to fix what I found inconvenient or wrong in others.

It was, in the most precise sense, a prayer life that had almost nothing to do with my own soul.

I stopped the novena that night.

I stopped the candle lighting.

I wrote a brief note to the contemplative convent, withdrawing the intention, though I didn’t explain why, and I began slowly, clumsily, against my own grain, to try to do what Carlo had described, to pray not for Juliana to become someone different, but for myself, to love her better, to let her be who she was, to stop the quiet, constant, prayerful pressure.

It was harder than the novenas.

He’d been right about that.

The novenas had given me something to do, a sense of action and purpose.

This new posture was closer to surrender.

Surrendering my conviction that I knew what Juliana needed better than Juliana did.

Surrendering my need for her to validate my faith by sharing it.

And something changed in me that was visible to Juliana before I told her about any of it.

She said to me months later over coffee.

You’re different lately.

Different how? She thought about it.

Less needy.

When we talk about big things, about God, about meaning.

You used to have this quality of trying to get somewhere.

Like every conversation was a mission.

Now you just talk.

You’re just present.

It’s nicer.

I laughed a little uncomfortably.

I’ve been working on something.

It shows.

Whatever it is, keep doing it.

I want to pause here for a moment because I imagine that some of you listening to this are doing exactly what I was doing.

praying earnestly and with genuine love for the conversion of a parent, a sibling, a friend, a spouse, lighting candles, saying noas, adding their names to prayer lists, convinced that if you just pray hard enough, faithfully enough, God will finally break through and they’ll come to faith.

And maybe you’re frustrated.

Maybe you’ve been doing this for years and nothing seems to change.

Maybe, like me, their continued contentment somehow bothers you.

Maybe you’re wondering why God isn’t answering.

I’m not saying stop praying for them.

I’m saying consider what you’re actually asking for.

Consider whether your prayer is asking God to love them or asking God to change them.

Consider whether you’re praying from love or from the need to control.

Consider Carlo’s question.

How often do you ask God to change you versus how often do you ask God to change the people around you? In July of 2007, two years after that dinner conversation, 9 months after Carlo died, Juliana called me and asked if we could meet for coffee.

She was nervous when she arrived.

She kept turning her espresso cup in her hands.

I waited.

I want to know more, she finally said, about your faith.

I want to understand it.

I was quiet for a moment.

What changed? She looked up.

You changed two years ago.

You changed.

You stopped looking at me like I was a problem to be solved.

You started just being my friend.

And I don’t know how to explain this exactly, but the love that came out of that change, the way you started being with me, I’d never seen anything like it.

And I kept thinking, what is teaching her to love like that? because I want to be near whatever that is.

I thought about a 14-year-old boy setting his fork down at a dinner table.

Carlo, I said, Carlo taught me.

She nodded slowly.

She already knew this in some way she couldn’t have articulated.

She already knew.

Juliana began attending mass occasionally that autumn, tentatively as an observer, making no commitments.

She read the Gospels slowly, asking me questions that were genuine questions rather than debate points.

She’d call me sometimes at strange hours.

Antonia, I was reading John 11 and I need to talk about what Jesus does when he gets to the tomb.

Not the miracle before the miracle, when he weeps.

Can we talk about that? And we’d talk for an hour.

In the spring of 2008, she enrolled in the RCIA.

On the Easter Vigil of 2009, she was baptized.

I stood beside her as her godmother, and I thought about the night in August of 2005 when I’d asked for fire from heaven and been told very quietly by my 14-year-old son that God doesn’t work that way.

When I asked Juliana sometime later what had finally moved her from open curiosity to commitment, she said something I’ve never forgotten.

It wasn’t an argument.

It wasn’t a book.

It was watching you learn to love me without needing me to be different.

And I thought if her God is teaching her to love like that with that kind of freedom, that kind of genuine release of control, then that God is worth knowing because that God respects people.

And I’d spent my whole life not feeling respected by religion, but you started respecting me.

And that changed everything.

I’ve thought about this a great deal in the years since about the theology of it and about what it means practically about what Carlo understood at 14 that took me decades to approach.

All right, I’ve got to ask before I keep going.

How are you feeling about all of this so far? Does any of this resonate with your own prayer life? Because I know I can’t be the only one who’s ever prayed with an agenda, who’s ever confused love with the need to manage someone else’s soul.

If this is landing for you, leave a comment below.

I genuinely read them, every single one.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe.

These stories reach people because you share them.

That’s the only way they travel.

Okay, back to what I was saying.

Because here’s what I’ve come to understand 20 years later as I sit with this conversation and everything that came after it.

Carlo was not just making a theological point that evening.

He was diagnosing something in me that was deeper than my prayer habits.

He was identifying a fundamental confusion I had about what love actually is.

I thought love was wanting the best for someone.

And I thought I knew what the best was.

And I thought the logical extension of those two things was to use every spiritual tool at my disposal to bring that best about, including prayer, including enlisted intercessors, including novenas aimed at softening a particular human heart.

I thought love was active in this way.

Interventionist, persistent, willing to keep pressing until the outcome arrived.

But Carlo was pointing at something I’d missed entirely.

Something that the whole tradition of Christian mysticism has tried to articulate across centuries.

That love, genuine love, requires the freedom of the beloved.

That any love that refuses to allow the other person to be themselves, to make their own choices, including choices we find heartbreaking, is not quite love.

It’s something else.

something that wears love’s face but has control at its center.

And prayer in service of that controlling love, prayer that asks God to be the instrument of our agenda for another person’s soul is Carlo said a kind of spiritual manipulation.

Not because our intentions are bad.

Mine weren’t bad.

My intentions toward Juliana were completely genuine.

But the effect was manipulation nonetheless, because what I was asking for was not her flourishing on her terms, but her capitulation to my terms, sanctioned and enforced by divine power.

God, Carlo told me, refuses to be recruited for that project.

Not because he doesn’t love the person we’re praying for, precisely because he does.

Because he is the one who designed freedom as the irreducible condition of authentic love.

who built into the cosmos the astonishing risk of genuine human choice.

Who looked at the possibility that his creatures would use that freedom to reject him and decided the risk was worth it because love that isn’t free isn’t love at all.

And he will not, even at our most earnest pleading, turn around and override the very thing he considered worth the entire cost of creation.

This doesn’t mean we stop praying for the people we love.

It means we learn to pray differently.

We ask for our own transformation rather than theirs.

We ask for the grace to love them well as they are.

We ask that if they ever reach for God of their own accord, he will be there.

We release the outcome.

We stop maintaining them as projects.

We love them as people.

And then this is the part that still astonishes me.

Sometimes they move toward God on their own, not because we forced it, because the love they experienced from us.

A love that finally had no agenda.

Finally stopped trying to get somewhere.

Finally just rested in them as they were.

That love pointed somewhere.

It gestured toward a source.

And sometimes they followed the gesture.

In the years since Carlo died, I’ve spoken about his faith many times.

His love of the eukarist, his daily mass attendance, his extraordinary theological depth.

And all of that is true and all of it matters.

But I think about that August evening often.

I think about a 14-year-old boy who had somehow through prayer and reading and what I can only call a kind of direct infused contemplation arrived at something that most people never arrive at.

The understanding that love and control are opposites.

That prayer in service of love must never become prayer in service of control.

and that God, who is love itself, honors freedom above almost everything else because freedom is the only condition under which love can be real.

Carlo died on October 12th, 2006 at 6:37 in the morning at the hospital San Gerardo in Monza.

[clears throat] He was 15 years old.

He had offered his suffering for Pope Benedict 16th and for the church.

His face and death was so peaceful that the nurses commented on it.

I have thought about that August dinner almost every day since, not with guilt, with gratitude, because he gave me something that night that I would carry through everything that came after, through his illness, his death, the decades of testimony that followed his beatification in Aisi in October of 2020 and his canonization in 2025.

He gave me a way of understanding love that made me a better mother to him in the time we had left, a better friend to Juliana, a better version of myself.

He taught me that real love opens its hands, that it holds people gently without gripping, that it prays not to change them, but to serve them.

That it trusts God to know each person better than we do, and trusts each person to find their own way to God or not.

in the freedom that God considered worth creating.

That’s what a 14-year-old taught me over a dinner I’ve never forgotten.

And if you’re listening to this today and you recognize yourself in who I was before that conversation, the prayerful campaigner, the well-intentioned spiritual manager, the person who has someone on your prayer list as a project rather than a person.

Then maybe this is your August dinner moment.

Ask yourself what Carlo asked me.

How often do you pray asking God to change you versus how often do you pray asking God to change the people around you? And if the answer makes you uncomfortable, maybe that discomfort is the beginning of something important.

Open your hands, release the project, love the person, and then pray.

really pray for God to make you the kind of person whose love is free enough, spacious enough, genuinely selfless enough that the people around you feel respected rather than managed, seen rather than assessed, loved rather than converted.

That kind of love is rare.

The world is desperately hungry for it.

Carlo knew that at 14.

I’m still learning it at 58.

If this story found you today, I don’t think it was an accident.

These things rarely are.

Carlo Audis, pray for us.

Help us love the way you loved freely, joyfully, without agenda.

Help us open our hands.

And to whoever is listening right now, carrying someone on your heart, God sees them, too.

Trust him with them.

Love them well, and let the rest be his.