Pray for the people you consider rivals

Not generically, specifically

Name them in your morning prayer

Ask for their success, their health, their family’s well-being

Our Lady says that praying specifically for the people we most resist is one of the most powerful Lenton disciplines available and that it produces practical results in the professional relationships themselves that cannot be explained purely by psychological means

He paused

The third is this

make penance through generosity, not charitable donation, though that is good

Generosity in the daily texture of professional life

The employee who needs more patience than is convenient

The client whose difficult situation deserves more attention than the billable hours justify

The colleague whose project needs resources that your project could use

Our Lady says that penance made through active generosity within your specific professional context is more aligned with your particular vocation than any amount of physical mortification

He looked up from the notebook

The fourth is this

Bring God explicitly into your decision-making, not through ritual or through asking for specific outcomes through the practice of pausing before significant decisions and asking, “Does this choice increase love in the world or decrease it? Is this decision I am about to make aligned with the man I

am trying to become or does it require me to be less than that man?” Our Lady says that even 30 seconds of genuine spiritual orientation before a significant professional decision changes the quality of that decision in ways that accumulate over 40 days into results that no purely strategic process produces

Carlo closed the notebook

She says to try it, papa

She says you are a man who trusts results and she says the results will speak for themselves

I sat with what my son had just given me for a long time

The apartment was quiet around us

Outside, Milan was doing what Milan does in early March, cold, purposeful, indifferent to the lurggical season

I am a man who trusts results

Our lady had identified the one argument that would reach me, and she had made it

Through my 14-year-old son in a living room in Milan, using the conceptual vocabulary of frequency and transmission and exponential growth, I told Carlo I would try, and I did

The Lent of 2006 was the first in my life that I inhabited rather than survived

Not perfectly, I failed at the fasting from competitive behavior more times than I care to count, and the discipline of praying for rivals required an ongoing effort that exposed the depth of the resistance I had not known was there

But I tried with a sincerity I had not previously brought to anything religious in my adult life

And the results, which I have recounted only to a small number of trusted people over 19 years, and which I am going to describe honestly now, were unlike anything I had produced through purely strategic means

Three contracts that had appeared conclusively lost were renewed during those 40 days, in each case through the resolution of relational tensions that I had been managing rather than addressing

two corporate legal disputes settled amicably, not through superior legal strategy, but through conversations in which I brought to the table a quality of genuine attention to the other party’s position that I had not previously been willing to offer

Our quarterly revenue increased by 23% in a period I had budgeted conservatively

My assistant of 12 years told me in early April that she did not know what had happened but that working with me had become a different experience and she wanted me to know it

I cannot prove causation

I am a financial consultant and I understand the difference between correlation and causation

But I can tell you that nothing in my professional environment changed during those 40 days except my interior orientation

And the results were not coincidental in a way that any honest assessment of the data supports

7 months later on October 12th, 2006, my son died

In the final days of his illness in the hospital at Monza, in the particular twilight of those last hours, he said to me in the quiet voice of someone who had very little breath remaining and was using it carefully, “Papa, you understand now that spirituality is not separate from business

It is what makes business blessed

” He was 15 years old

He had been right about everything

I did not share what Carlo had given me for a very long time, 19 years, with the exception of Antonia and a very small number of people close to the family

The reasons were multiple

In the early years after his death, I was grieving

Doing the necessary work of continuing to exist while the organizing principle of my life had been removed

The cause for his beatification brought structure to those years

a shared purpose for Antonia and me that helped

But grief has its own timetable, and I was not in a position to give away something this intimate before it had been fully received

As the years passed, and I continued to practice the Lenton discipline Carlo had described, each year more fluently, each year with a deeper understanding of what our lady had been communicating through him

I watched the results accumulate in ways that went far beyond the professional

My marriage deepened

My capacity for the particular quality of attention that Carlo himself had always demonstrated

Full presence, genuine interest, the willingness to be actually moved by what was actually moving developed in ways that I attribute entirely to this discipline

I became a different businessman, not a less effective one, a more effective one with a different metric of effectiveness

I began measuring success not only by outcomes achieved but by the quality of the relationships through which outcomes were achieved

I began applying to my professional decisions the question Carlo had relayed

Does this choice increase love in the world or decrease it? I found over years that the question produced better decisions than pure strategic analysis not in every case not with perfect consistency but with enough regularity to constitute evidence

After Carlo’s beatatification in 2020, I began speaking about him more publicly at business conferences, at retreats organized for Catholic professionals

At events organized around his cause, I spoke about his character, his faith, his approach to his own dying

I did not in those initial years speak about March 8th, 2006

That remained private

The decision to speak about it publicly came in the first Lent after his canonization

The Lent of 2026, the first Lent in which the church had formerly declared Carlo Acutis to be a saint, to have lived and died in a manner that bore the unmistakable signature of heroic holiness

I understood Carlo’s canonization as, among other things, a kind of authorization, a formal confirmation that what I had witnessed in my son was what I had believed it to be

And with that confirmation came a renewed sense of responsibility for what he had entrusted to me

I began sharing the Lenton business framework, the four practices our lady had communicated through Carlo with executives and professionals who came to me through the networks that had formed around his legacy

Roberto Silva was the first significant response

Roberto is the CEO of a multinational with operations across 12 countries

A man of considerable sophistication and very little patience for anything that cannot demonstrate measurable return

He came to me through a mutual colleague, skeptical but curious, having read Carlo’s biography and having been against his own expectations, genuinely moved by it

I told Roberto what Carlo had told me

I described the frequency metaphor

I described the four practices

I described my own Lent of 2006 and its results with the same factual precision I would use in presenting a financial analysis

Roberto listened with the specific quality of attention that serious businessmen bring to things they are not certain they believe but are not certain they disbelieve

He asked a number of questions I could not fully answer

Questions about mechanism, about replicability, about the relationship between the spiritual practices and the professional outcomes

I told him honestly that I could not answer them with the completeness he was asking for

I told him what our lady had reportedly said to Carlo, that he was a man who trusted results, and the results would speak for themselves

He tried it

The Lent of 2025, the Lent after Carlo’s canonization, he applied with the systematic discipline of a man accustomed to implementing strategic initiatives, the four practices Carlo had described, the fast from competitive framing, the specific prayer for rivals, the penance through active professional generosity, the 32nd spiritual orientation before significant decisions

He called me after Easter

He said, “I do not have a complete explanation for what happened

I can tell you that my three most difficult professional relationships, relationships I had classified as irreparably adversarial, underwent shifts during those 40 days that I cannot account for through any factor I controlled directly

I can tell you that two decisions I would ordinarily have made on purely strategic grounds and which I paused to apply your son’s question to I made differently and both the different decisions produced better outcomes than the original decisions would have

I can tell you that my executive team without any communication from me about what I was doing reported a change in the tenor of our leadership culture during that period

He paused

I can also tell you he said that something happened to me personally that I am finding more difficult to quantify

I am more present at home

My wife has noticed

My children have noticed

I am not performing presence

I am actually present in a way that I was not before

And I think this is the result that Carlo’s framework is actually optimized for

The professional outcomes are real and they matter

But they are the surface of something deeper

what your son gave me is a practice that is reorganizing my understanding of what I am actually doing with my life

He said, I am going to do this every Lent for the rest of my professional career and I am going to tell other executives why

Dr

Maria Gonzalez, the director of a private hospital in Spain, reached me through the paliotative care networks that had formed around Carlo’s legacy

She had been using elements of his approach in her institutional management, specifically the practice of fasting from purely profit-driven decisions during Lent and replacing them with decisions that prioritized patient experience and staff well-being over financial optimization

She reported changes in patient outcomes that her medical staff could not explain through changes in protocol or treatment

She reported a decrease in staff burnout that her HR team attributed to cultural shift but could not fully account for

She reported most striking of all that the hospital’s financial performance had not decreased had in fact marginally improved despite the explicit subordination of financial optimization during those 40 days

What I have concluded she told me is that Carlo’s framework is not an alternative to professional effectiveness

It is a deeper form of it

When you align your professional decisions with love rather than with optimization, you are not abandoning good strategy

You are accessing a form of wisdom that pure optimization cannot reach

Carlo seems to have understood this at 14

I am still learning it at 53

My name is Andrea Autis

I am 57 years old

I have spent my professional life in the world of financial consulting, measuring, analyzing, assessing the gap between what organizations believe about themselves and what their accounts actually reveal

My son sat in my living room on a Thursday evening in early March 19 years ago and gave me the most important professional consultation of my career

He was 14 years old

He had spent that afternoon in eucharistic adoration and he had come home with a message from our lady that was addressed specifically and personally to me formatted in the language of a financial consultant so that a financial consultant would understand it and use it

Carlo Akutis was born on May 3rd 1991 in London

He died on October 12th 2006 in Milan at 15 years old

He was beatified on October 10th, 2020 in Aisi

He was canonized in September of 2025 in Rome

He cataloged eucharistic miracles because he believed that the evidence of God in the world deserved to be documented with precision and made available to anyone willing to look

He gave his father a Lenton business framework because he believed that the grace available during these 40 days deserved to be received with the same precision and that no one who had access to the information had the right to keep it private

You are receiving it now

The lent we are in is not an obligation to be discharged

It is an antenna being raised by two billion people pointing in the same direction

The frequency is available

The transmission capacity is at its seasonal peak

The grace is there to be received by anyone willing to tune in

Fast from the framing that makes other people obstacles

Pray specifically for the people you most resist

Make penance through active generosity in your daily professional life

Pause before significant decisions and ask whether the choice increases love or decreases it

Try it for 40 days

Our lady told my son that you are a person who trusts results

The results will speak for themselves

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