At canonization Mass, two mothers stand out as giants of confidence in God

(OSV News) -- The Catholic Church has its first millennial saint. At a packed canonization Mass in Rome, with 80,000 attending, it was the face of the mother that said it all during the canonization Mass -- Antonia Salzano was moved beyond words when her son, Carlo Acutis, was officially declared saint of the Catholic Church.

The miracle that sealed his path to sainthood was front and center at the Sept. 7 canonization Mass. Twenty-four-year-old Valeria Vargas Valverde of Costa Rica, who nearly died from a traumatic bike accident in 2022, prayed at the Mass. Her recovery, which doctors called medically inexplicable, followed her mother's desperate prayers at then-Blessed Carlo's tomb in Assisi, Italy.

At the canonization Mass, confidence in God of those two mothers was clearly in the air.

"Carlo's death was an extraordinary loss for Antonia. Like any mother she deeply grieved his passing," Father Patrick Briscoe, newly appointed head of communications of the Dominican order, told OSV News. It was Carlo, however, who gave her a new source of confidence, Father Briscoe underlined.

Attending the canonization Mass with her husband, Andrea, and Carlo's twin siblings, born four years after he died -- Francesa and Michele -- Salzano emotionally shook her head when Pope Leo XIV said that Carlo, now a saint, "encountered Jesus in his family, thanks to his parents ... and then at school, and above all in the sacraments celebrated in the parish community."

"He grew up naturally integrating prayer, sport, study and charity into his days as a child and young man," the pope said.

Salzano recalled many times in her interviews that when Carlo was little, she wasn't practicing her faith a lot. It was Carlo who wanted to be in the church every day, and she facilitated that for him.

"'He saved me,' Antonia has said on many occasions. It was Carlo who brought Antonia back into the practice of her Catholic faith," said Father Briscoe, who was among hundreds of priests concelebrating Mass at St. Peter's Square, presided by Pope Leo on Sept. 7.

During a Sept. 5 screening of the documentary "Roadmap to Reality," directed by Tim Moriarty and produced by Jim Wahlberg at the North American College in Rome, Salzano said that "without Jesus we cannot do anything -- and Carlo understood this."

"He always said, 'I want to please God,'" Salzano told OSV News in 2024. "When he did his first holy Communion -- when he was 7 years old -- he wrote, 'To be united with God: this is my life program.' And he maintained this promise all his life until the end, until his death."

When Pope Francis had approved a second miracle attributed to then-Blessed Carlo Acutis in 2024, paving the way to his canonization, none was happier than his mother.

"It was great news because we were waiting for this declaration -- especially for all the devotees he has around the world," she told OSV News.

Thanks to this miracle, a young girl was healed after a bike accident.

Reading the first universal prayer in Spanish during the canonization Mass, Valverde -- a beautiful young woman from Costa Rica, now 24 -- was a living testimony that faith can work miracles.

But it was her mother, Liliana, who made the miracle possible when on July 8, 2022, she desperately prayed at then-Blessed Carlo's tomb in Assisi, leaving a letter describing her plea.

Six days earlier, on July 2, Liliana's daughter Valeria had fallen from her bicycle in Florence, Italy, where she was attending university.

After a devastating head injury, she required a craniotomy -- a surgical procedure that involves temporarily removing a part of the skull, known as a bone flap, to expose the brain for the treatment -- and the removal of her right occipital bone to ease the pressure on her brain, an operation her doctors said she was unlikely to survive.

"Valeria's mother prayed with a sincere faith. Her prayer wasn't intricate or informed by a complex theology. She was simply praying with the heart of a mother who was looking to aid her daughter," Father Briscoe said.

The same day Liliana left her letter at Carlo's tomb, begging for his intercession, Valeria started to breathe spontaneously. The next day, she began to move and partially regained her speech, Vatican News reported. Ten days later a CAT scan proved that her hemorrhage had disappeared, and on Aug. 11, 2022, Valeria was moved to rehabilitation therapy.

On Sept. 2, Valeria could herself accompany her mother to Assisi to thank Blessed Carlo for his intercession.

"Part of the joy of the canonization Mass was the proximity of those who witnessed these miracles. Valeria's presence contributed enormously to the joy of the celebration. She was the sign of a mother's answered prayer," Father Briscoe said.

Salzano told OSV News in 2024 that she spoke with Valverde who was "suspended between life and death" before her mother prayed at the tomb of the young teen.

"The mother was a woman of faith. She prayed; she went to Carlo because she had a devotion (to him) and kneeled in front of his grave all day praying for her daughter's healing and she received the grace," she said.

At the canonization Mass, Valeria, in a simple black dress and with her hair modestly tied up in a bun, without showing any sign of a serious head injury and operation, prayed "For the holy people of God, that by joyfully welcoming the word that saves, we may follow Jesus along the way of the cross, and bear witness in the world to his love."

Salzano for her part said that with all the trials Christians, especially young people, face today, Carlo's life serves as a reminder that every person has "beautiful things" inside them and to "not be scared" but "be confident."

"We are not made to be people in this universe of chaos without a goal. God created us for a goal, and that goal is paradise," Salzano said.

Father Briscoe, who has a strong personal devotion to St. Carlo, concluded: "To a world now marked by selfies and self-interest, Carlo Acutis proposes an alternative. 'Not me, but God,' Carlo often said. His witness and the testimony of these answered prayers point us beyond ourselves to a God who offers new horizons of joy."