There are moments in monastic life when the silence you have practiced for decades, the disciplined, structured, rulebound silence of cistersian observance is suddenly shattered and replaced by a different kind of silence altogether.

A silence so dense with divine presence that you cannot move, cannot speak, cannot do anything except remain motionless in awe while God fills the space with a tangibility that transcends everything your 43 years of contemplative prayer ever prepared you to experience.

My name is Father Brendan Osullivan.

I am 68 years old and for the past 43 years I have been a Trappist monk at Mount Meer Abbey in County Waterford, Ireland.

One of the oldest cisters monasteries in the country founded in 1832.

A place of contemplative silence where approximately 25 monks live under the rule of St.

Benedict dedicating our lives to prayer, manual work, and especially to near absolute silence, except during lurggical hours when we chant the psalms in community.

For more than four decades, I have embraced monastic life completely with its rhythms of prayer from 3:15 a.

m.

until 8 or p.

m.

Its long hours of silence where the only communications permitted are basic gestures or written notes of extreme necessity and its radical separation from the outside world where visitors are welcome for spiritual retreats.

but carefully kept in separate areas from the monks to preserve our contemplative environment.

But during those 43 years, I have also carried a secret weight that no one in the monastic community knew completely.

From my priestly ordination in 1983 until approximately the year 2000 for nearly 17 years, I struggled with severe alcohol addiction that I kept hidden from my brother monks through careful covering behaviors, bottles hidden in remote places of the monastery, elaborate excuses to explain my occasional absences or erratic behaviors, and especially a double spiritual life where externally I participated in all liturgy and communal work while internally I was spiritually empty praying words without real faith chanting psalms without genuine connection to God.

I managed to overcome that addiction in 2000 with help from an alcoholics’s anonymous program I secretly attended in the nearby town of Kapaquinn.

But although my physical sobriety was restored, my spiritual life remained broken, withered, mechanical for the following six years until August 14th, 2006 when during a youth retreat that our monastery organized for Irish and Italian Catholic teenagers.

I briefly met in the closter a 15-year-old Italian boy named Carlo Autis.

after a conversation of barely 10 minutes where I explained in my English with a thick Irish accent the history of the monastery and he listened with unusual attention for an adolescent.

He suddenly hugged me with surprising strength for someone so thin and whispered in my ear in imperfect but understandable English, “Father Brendan, Jesus knows your secret pain.

He forgives you and now he gives back what you lost.

Three days after that embrace on August 17th, 2006, something happened at Mount Meer that had never happened in the 174 years of the monastery’s history.

The usual monastic silence was transformed into a different silence, deeper, so tangible that all 25 monks present during vespers that evening simultaneously experienced what I can only describe as divine presence so overwhelming that we completely suspended the planned liturgy and remained in absolute silent adoration for two hours without anyone moving a muscle.

And when that presence finally dissipated, we all knew without need for words that something had changed, not only in the monastery, but especially in me, the marked monk who had been embraced by a holy teenager three days earlier.

This is the story of how a dying 15-year-old saint visited an Irish Trappist monastery, embraced a secretly broken monk, and three days later triggered a mystical experience so profound that 18 years later, we still speak of Carlos silence.

The day God visited Mount Meer in such a tangible way that all we could do was remain motionless in his presence.

To understand what Carlo Acudis’ embrace meant to me and what happened 3 days later in our monastery choir, you need to understand who I was on August 14th, 2006.

a 49-year-old Trappist monk who had spent 23 years in monastic life, but who had been spiritually dead inside for most of those years, maintaining perfect external observance while experiencing complete internal emptiness.

I was born in 1956 in County Cork, Ireland to a traditional Irish Catholic family.

My father was a school teacher.

My mother raised six children with the kind of practical piety characteristic of rural Irish Catholicism in the 1950s and60s.

We attended mass every Sunday, prayed the rosary as a family and maintained devotion to local saints.

But our faith was more cultural inheritance than personal conviction.

I entered Mount Meer Abbey in 1981 at age 25, not because of any dramatic conversion or mystical calling, but because I was a serious introspective young man who felt drawn to the contemplative life’s promise of peace, order, and closeness to God.

The Trappist life appealed to me.

The structure, the silence, the separation from the world’s chaos, the rhythm of lurggical prayer punctuating each day.

My novicate years 1981 to 1983 were genuinely spiritual.

I experienced God’s presence in the silence, felt consolation during the long hours of lectio deina sacred reading, and found joy in the communal chanting of the divine office.

I was ordained to the priesthood 1983, took my solemn vows, and settled into what I expected would be a lifetime of growing closer to God through contemplative prayer and monastic discipline.

But something went wrong that I still don’t fully understand.

Perhaps it was the weight of priestly responsibility.

Perhaps it was undiagnosed depression.

Perhaps it was simply spiritual warfare.

But within months of my ordination, I began experiencing what mystics call spiritual dryness.

The sense that God had withdrawn, that prayer was hitting a ceiling, that the presence I had felt during the visi had evaporated.

At first I fought it through increased prayer and penance.

But the dryness persisted and in my desperation to feel something, anything.

I made the disastrous decision that would shape the next 17 years of my life.

I started drinking.

Alcohol was available at Mount Meer as it is in most monasteries.

We produced some wine for lurggical use and we kept a small supply of spirits for medicinal purposes and for offering hospitality to visitors.

But Trappist monks are expected to be temperate, moderate in all things.

I was not moderate.

I was desperate.

and alcohol provided what prayer no longer did.

A temporary sense of warmth, connection, relief from the crushing emptiness I felt.

It started small.

A glass of wine after complin prayer taken alone in my cell to help me sleep.

Then it escalated.

Wine before meals.

Spirits hidden in my cell.

bottles cashed in remote areas of our extensive monastery grounds where I could drink without being observed.

I became expert at hiding my addiction.

Trappist monks live in structured community but with significant private time for prayer and work.

I use that privacy to drink.

I became skilled at appearing sober during communal activities even when I wasn’t.

I developed elaborate systems for disposing of empty bottles.

I invented excuses for why I might smell of alcohol or appear slightly unsteady.

For 17 years, 1983 to 2000, I maintained this double life.

Externally, I was faithful Trappist monk, attending all seven daily offices, vigils at 3:15 a.

m.

, lords, tur, sexed, none, vespers, complainant, participating in manual labor, keeping silence, observing the rule of benedict.

Internally, I was spiritually dead alcoholic, going through motions, praying words without meaning, chanting psalms without connection to God, celebrating mass while feeling nothing.

The worst part wasn’t the drinking itself.

It was the spiritual death that both caused and was caused by the drinking.

I had entered monastic life to find God.

Instead, I had lost him completely, and the silence that was supposed to be space for encountering divine presence had become empty void that I filled with alcohol because I couldn’t bear the nothingness.

By the late 1990s, my addiction was becoming harder to hide.

My health was deteriorating.

My participation in communal activities was increasingly erratic.

Several brother monks expressed concern, though they attributed my problems to illness or exhaustion rather than suspecting alcoholism.

In 1999, I had what alcoholics call a moment of clarity.

I was alone in one of our monasteries outlying fields, drunk at 10 or a.

m.

, and I realized I’m going to die like this.

Either the alcohol will kill me physically, or the spiritual death I’m experiencing will destroy whatever remains of my vocation.

I didn’t know where to turn.

I couldn’t confess to my abbott.

I was too ashamed, too afraid of being expelled from the monastery.

I couldn’t confess to my spiritual director.

I had been lying to him for years about the state of my soul.

I couldn’t confess to my brother monks.

The shame was too crushing.

So I did something I had never done before.

I sought help outside the monastery.

In January 2000, I began secretly attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Capacin, the nearest town to Mount Meer.

I would tell my superiors I needed to go to town for medical appointments or monastery business, and instead I would attend AA meetings.

The people in that AA group, workingclass Irish men and women with their own addiction stories, saved my life.

They taught me that addiction is disease, not moral failure.

They taught me the 12 steps.

They taught me that recovery requires rigorous honesty and daily surrender.

By June 2000, I was sober.

I have remained sober since then, 24 years as of this writing.

I continued attending AA meetings secretly for several years, gradually transitioning my recovery work into prayer and spiritual direction within the monastery.

But here’s the devastating truth that no one understood, including myself, for many years.

While I achieved physical sobriety in 2000, I did not achieve spiritual recovery.

I stopped drinking, but I didn’t recover my relationship with God.

From 2000 to 2006, 6 years of physical sobriety.

I continued experiencing the same spiritual dryness that had driven me to alcohol in the first place.

I prayed the hours faithfully.

I participated in all communal activities.

I maintained perfect external observance.

But inside I felt nothing.

Prayer was mechanical recitation.

The eukarist I celebrated daily was ritual performed correctly but without consolation or presence.

The silence that surrounded my life was empty rather than full.

not pregnant with divine mystery but simply void.

I began to believe that this was my permanent state that my 17 years of addiction had so damaged my spiritual capacity that I would never again experience God’s presence.

That I was condemned to spend the rest of my life going through monastic motions while spiritually dead inside.

I developed a kind of resigned despair.

I would remain externally faithful to my vows because I had nowhere else to go and because the structure of monastic life was all I knew.

But I had given up hope of ever feeling God’s presence again.

This was who I was on August 14th, 2006.

a 49-year-old Trappist monk with 23 years of monastic profession, six years of sobriety from alcohol and complete spiritual emptiness that I had learned to hide from everyone around me just as effectively as I had once hidden my drinking.

I was the broken monk, the marked monk, the monk who had lost God in the silence and didn’t know how to find him again.

August 14th, 2006 was the somnity of the assumption of Mary.

Mount Meer was hosting a three-day youth retreat for approximately 30 Irish and Italian Catholic teenagers.

An unusual activity for our strictly contemplative monastery, but one our abbot, Father Colum, had approved as a form of evangelization consistent with our cistersian carrorism.

The retreat had begun on Friday, August 11th.

Most participants were Irish teenagers from local parishes in Cork and Waterford, but there was also a small group from Italy, about eight young people who had come specifically because their parish priest knew our abbot and had arranged for them to experience Irish monastic spirituality.

As a professed monk and ordained priest, I was assigned various small tasks to support the retreat.

Leading some prayer times, helping supervise manual work in our monastery farm, and giving tours of our historic buildings to interested participants.

On Monday morning, August 14th, I was assigned to give a cloister tour to a small group of five Italian teenagers who had expressed particular interest in monastic architecture and history.

My English is fluent, but with a very thick Irish accent that many foreigners find difficult to understand.

So, I spoke slowly using simple vocabulary.

The group included four boys and one girl, all approximately 14- 16 years old.

One of the boys caught my attention immediately, not because of anything he said or did, but because of how he looked.

He was noticeably thin, pale, with deep shadows under his eyes.

He looked sick, genuinely ill.

He wore jeans and a simple t-shirt with a computer image printed on it.

The casual clothing of a modern teenager, not what I typically associated with young people interested in monasticism.

as I explain the history of Mount Meer, founded in 1832 by Irish Cistersian monks who had been exiled to France during religious persecution and then returned to establish this abbey.

This thin, pale boy listened with unusual attention, occasionally asking intelligent questions in surprisingly good English.

Father, how many monks live here now? 25 brothers, I responded.

And they all keep silence all the time.

I mostly.

We speak only during community meetings or when absolutely necessary.

The rest is silence and prayer.

Is the silence difficult? he asked with genuine curiosity.

Rather than the skepticism I often heard from young people at first, yes, but after years the silence becomes a gift.

It’s where we hear God most clearly.

The boy nodded thoughtfully.

Then he introduced himself.

My name is Carlo.

Carlo Audis.

I’m from Milan.

Pleased to meet you, Carlo.

I’m Father Brendan O’Sullivan.

Father Brendan, can I ask you something personal? I was surprised by the directness of his question.

You can ask, I may not answer.

Do you hear God in the silence? Really? The question struck me like a physical blow because it touched exactly my secret wound.

I maintained the silence.

I participated in the liturgies.

I fulfilled all my monastic obligations.

But had I heard God in the silence for years? No, not really.

Prayer was mechanical, not communication.

Observance was duty, not relationship.

I tried to listen.

I responded evasively, but sometimes it’s difficult.

Carlo looked at me with eyes that seemed to see far more than a 15-year-old should be able to see.

And then he said something that made my heart stop.

Father, I know about the alcohol and I know about the emptiness you feel even though you stopped drinking 6 years ago.

Jesus showed me.

I felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach.

What? How do you I’m dying, father.

Leukemia.

Probably have weeks left, maybe months if I’m fortunate.

And during this time, God is showing me things about people.

Showing me so I can help them.

The other four teenagers in the tour group had moved ahead to examine a statue of the Virgin Mary in one of the closter aloves.

Carlo and I were slightly behind them.

Our conversation momentarily private.

You were an alcoholic for 17 years, Carlo continued in a low voice.

From 1983 to 2000, you hid it well.

Very well.

No one knew.

But it destroyed your interior life.

And even though you’ve been sober for 6 years, you haven’t recovered your connection with God.

You go through the motions.

You pray the hours.

You celebrate mass.

But you don’t feel anything.

You think God abandoned you because of your past sins.

You think the spiritual dryness is permanent punishment.

Tears began streaming down my face.

I couldn’t help it.

How? How do you know all this? I’ve never told anyone.

Because Jesus told me.

He showed me your story.

And he sent me here specifically to this monastery on this day to tell you something you need to hear.

He never abandoned you.

He was with you even during your worst years.

Even when you were drunk and desparing, even when you felt completely cut off from him.

And he forgives you completely.

Not partially, not conditionally, completely.

But I’m I’m still empty inside.

I don’t feel his presence.

I pray, but it’s just words.

That’s why I’m here, Carlos said with gentle firmness.

Jesus wants to restore what was lost.

The dryness, the emptiness, it’s ending very soon, within days.

And then Carlo did something completely unexpected in a monastic context where physical contact between monks and visitors is minimal and carefully regulated.

He stepped forward and hugged me.

Not a brief polite embrace, a full strong hug that lasted perhaps 10 seconds.

And while he held me, he whispered in my ear in his imperfect but understandable English, “Father Brendan, Jesus knows your secret pain.

He forgives you completely.

And now he gives back what you lost.

Your life in God, it’s being restored right now, starting now.

” When Carlo released me, the other four teenagers had returned from examining the statue.

The tour continued normally.

I showed them the chapter house, the refactory, the scriptorum, explaining our daily routine and the history of cistersian spirituality.

Carlo asked occasional questions, always intelligent and engaged, but made no further personal comments.

The tour ended after about 45 minutes.

The group thanked me and returned to their retreat activities.

I went to my assigned manual labor, working in the monastery vegetable garden, but I couldn’t concentrate.

My hands moved through familiar motions of weeding and watering, but my mind was completely absorbed by what had just happened.

How had Carlo known about my alcoholism, about the 17 years of hidden addiction, about my continued spiritual dryness despite six years of sobriety? These were details I had never shared with anyone.

Not my habit, not my spiritual director, not my AA sponsor.

How could a 15-year-old Italian boy I had just met know my deepest secrets? And more troubling, what did he mean when he said my spiritual restoration was starting now, that within days the emptiness would end? How could he promise something like that? The youth retreat continued through Tuesday and Wednesday, August 15, 16.

I saw Carlo occasionally at a distance during communal meals and prayer times, but we didn’t speak again privately.

He appeared to be enjoying the retreat.

I saw him laughing with other teenagers, participating in work projects, attending our liturgies with obvious reverence.

On Wednesday afternoon, August 16th, the retreat concluded and the young people departed.

I watched the bus carrying the Italian group drive away down the winding road from our monastery, and I wondered if I would ever see Carlo again or learn more about how he had known what he knew.

That evening, I tried to pray during my private holy hour before vespers.

I knelt in the monastery church before the blessed sacrament and poured out my heart.

Lord, if that boy really spoke for you, if what he said is true, please, I’m begging you, restore what I lost.

I can’t continue like this.

Going through the motions, praying without connection, celebrating your mysteries without feeling your presence.

either restor me or let me die.

I felt nothing in response.

The same emptiness I had felt for years.

I almost despared again.

Perhaps Carlo had been wrong.

Perhaps it was all wishful thinking.

Perhaps.

And then the bells rang for vespers.

It was 6 p.

m.

Thursday, August 17th, 2006.

All 25 monks of Mount Meer Abbey gathered in the choir of our church for vespers as we do every evening at 6 a.

m.

Our church is a beautiful Gothic revival structure built in the 1850s with stone arches, stained glass windows, and wooden choir stalls arranged in two facing rows where the monks chant the divine office antaponally.

The evening was ordinary in every external way.

Summer sunlight filtered through the western windows.

The air was still warm from the August day.

We took our places in the choir stalls, professed monks in the main seats, younger brothers in the back rows, and the caner began the opening psalm.

We chanted Psalm 141.

Lord, I call to you.

Come to me quickly.

Hear my voice when I call to you.

May my prayer be set before you like incense.

May the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice.

The familiar Latin words sung in Gregorian chant filled the church.

This was our normal rhythm.

We had chanted these same psalms in the same way thousands of times over the years.

Nothing unusual, nothing different until we reached Psalm 139.

Oh Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up, you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.

As we chanted these words, I felt something change in the atmosphere of the choir.

Subtle at first, a slight shift, like the air pressure changing before a storm.

The air became more dense, more present, more inhabited.

And with that density came a sensation I hadn’t felt in years, but recognized immediately.

The presence of God.

Not a vague feeling or emotional sentiment, but presence as real and tangible as another person entering the room, except infinitely more powerful, more holy, more overwhelming.

I glanced around discreetly, trying not to break the lurggical flow.

Other monks were also showing signs of disturbance, not distress, but awareness.

Father Michael, our caner, who was leading the psalm, faltered slightly in his chanting, “Brother Thomas,” sitting across from me, had tears on his face.

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The chanting slowed, voices dropped out one by one.

Father Michael stopped singing altogether, his mouth open, but no sound emerging.

Within perhaps 30 seconds, complete silence had fallen over the choir.

But it wasn’t our usual monastic silence, the disciplined, rulebound silence of cistersian practice that we maintained throughout most of our day.

This was different.

This silence was full, dense, charged, as if the space itself had become saturated with an invisible but utterly tangible presence.

I couldn’t move, not from fear, but from overwhelming awe.

The presence I was experiencing that we were all experiencing I could see it on every face around me was so holy, so powerful, so utterly beyond anything human that movement seemed impossible, even irreverent.

And in that silence, God spoke to me, not with audible words, but with communication that bypassed language entirely and went straight to the core of my being.

I never left you.

During all those years when you felt abandoned, I was with you.

When you were drunk and desparing, I was with you.

When you were sober but empty, I was with you.

Your dryness was not punishment.

It was refining.

And now the refining is complete.

Receive what I have always wanted to give you myself.

I collapsed to my knees, weeping uncontrollably, and looking around through my tears, I saw that I wasn’t alone.

Several other monks were also on their knees.

Some had their hands raised in spontaneous worship, a gesture completely foreign to our traditional cistersian liturgy, but apparently irrepressible in the face of this presence.

Brother James, one of our oldest monks at 82 years old, who had been at Mount Meer for nearly 60 years, was prostrate on the floor, his body shaking with sobs.

Father Augustine, our Aby’s theologian and most intellectually sophisticated member, had his face buried in his hands, clearly overwhelmed.

We remained in that silence for what felt like hours, but was actually about 2 hours by later calculation.

No one moved to continue the liturgy.

No one tried to impose structure or order.

We simply remained kneeling, sitting, prostrate in the presence of God that had invaded our choir and rendered all our carefully planned prayers unnecessary.

The presence was not uniform in how it affected each monk.

Later, when we shared our experiences, it became clear that while we all felt the overwhelming holiness and reality of God’s presence, the specific content of what he communicated varied according to each person’s need.

Father Colum, our abbot, received clarity about difficult decisions facing the monastery.

Brother David, struggling with his vocation, received confirmation that he was exactly where God wanted him.

Father Austin received answers to theological questions he had wrestled with for years.

But for me, the message was consistent and relentless.

You are forgiven.

You are loved.

You are restored.

The emptiness is ending.

I am here.

I have always been here.

and I will never leave you.

Around 8:00 p.

m.

, 2 hours after Vespers had begun, the presence began to gradually diminish.

Not disappear entirely, but withdraw like a tide receding.

The air became less dense.

Breathing became easier.

Movement became possible again.

We remained in silence for several more minutes, each monk processing what had just occurred.

Then, Father Colum, our abbott, stood slowly, and in a voice horse with emotion, spoke, breaking the traditional monastic silence in recognition that something extraordinary required extraordinary response.

Brothers, what has happened here? One by one, haltingly, monks began to share.

Father Michael described feeling physically pressed down by holiness.

Brother Thomas said it was like standing in front of a furnace of love.

Father Augustine with his theologian’s precision called it immediate experience of divine essence normally reserved for beatotific vision.

When my turn came, I struggled to find words.

I felt forgiven, restored, like something dead inside me came back to life, like like God gave back what I had lost.

Father Column nodded slowly.

Brothers, I believe we have just experienced what the mystics call infused contemplation, direct, unmediated awareness of God’s presence.

This is extraordinarily rare, especially to an entire community simultaneously.

We must discern what this means and why it happened.

Now I raised my hand tentatively.

Father Abbott, I think I might know why, and I told them about Carlo, the Italian teenager from the retreat.

our conversation in the cloister three days earlier.

How he had known about my secret alcoholism and spiritual emptiness.

His prophetic words about restoration.

His embrace and promise.

Jesus gives back what you lost.

Father, I concluded.

Carlos said it would happen within days.

Three days ago, he embraced me and made that promise.

And tonight, 3 days later, it happened.

not just to me but to all of us.

Father Column was silent for a long moment.

Then he said something that sent chills through the assembled community.

Brothers, I received an email today from Father Josephe, the Italian parish priest who organized the retreat group.

The young man Carlo Autis is gravely ill, terminal leukemia.

His days are numbered.

And Father Joseeppe says Carlo has a reputation for holiness among those who know him, that he says and does things that cannot be explained naturally.

The implication hung in the air.

A dying teenager saint had visited our monastery, embraced a broken monk, prophesied his restoration, and three days later triggered a mystical experience for our entire community.

In the days and weeks following that extraordinary Thursday evening, life at Mount Miller gradually returned to normal routine, but fundamentally transformed.

For me personally, the change was dramatic and sustained.

The spiritual dryness that had plagued me for years, that had driven me to alcohol and persisted even after sobriety, simply vanished, evaporated, dissolved.

Prayer became alive again.

The psalms I chanted seven times daily were no longer empty words, but living communication.

The mass I celebrated daily was no longer ritual performed correctly, but encounter with the living Christ.

The silence that surrounded my life was no longer empty void, but full space where God’s presence could be felt consistently, not with the overwhelming intensity of August 17th, but with gentle, steady reality.

I finally understood what Carlo had meant when he whispered in my ear, “Jesus gives back what you lost.

” He had lost nothing.

Or rather, nothing had actually been lost.

God had been present all along, even during my worst years of addiction and emptiness.

But my capacity to perceive that presence had been damaged.

And on August 17th, 2006, that capacity was supernaturally restored.

We learned more about Carlo in the weeks following our mystical experience.

Father Josephe, the Italian priest, sent regular updates.

Carlos’s leukemia was progressing rapidly.

He was suffering significantly but maintaining joy and peace that astounded his doctors and family.

He continued to attend mass when physically able, always receiving communion with profound devotion.

And we learned that our monastery was not the only place Carlo had visited during his final months, bringing prophetic words and supernatural knowledge to people he had never met before.

On October 12th, 2006, less than 2 months after his visit to Mount Meer, Carlo Audis died at San Gerardo Hospital in Monza, Italy.

He was 15 years old.

When Father Column announced Carlo’s death to our community, we held a special prayer service for the repose of his soul.

But even as we prayed the traditional prayers for the dead, there was a strange sense among us that we weren’t praying for Carlo so much as asking Carlo to pray for us because we had already experienced his spiritual power, his prophetic knowledge, his ability to channel divine grace in ways that transcended his young age and short life.

In the years since 2006, several things have happened that confirmed our collective sense that something extraordinary occurred during Carlo’s visit and its aftermath.

First, the story of Carlo’s silence became part of Mount Meer’s oral tradition.

New monks entering the community are told about the Thursday evening when the entire monastery experienced simultaneous infuse contemplation.

Several monks who were present that night have written detailed accounts for the abbey archives.

And these accounts are remarkably consistent in describing both the external phenomena, the sudden silence, the 2-hour suspension of liturgy, the varied emotional responses, and the internal experience.

Overwhelming sense of divine presence, specific messages tailored to individual monks needs, permanent spiritual transformation for many.

Second, Carlo Audis was beatified by the Catholic Church on October 10th 20 in Aisi, Italy.

When news of his beatification reached Mount Miller, our community celebrated with special somnity.

Not just because we admire all saints, but because this particular saint had personally visited our monastery and left an indelible mark on our communal life.

Father column who is now 78 and still serving as abbott cistersian abbotts serve for life unless they resign wrote to the Vatican postulator for Carlo’s cause offering to provide testimony about the mystical experience of August 17th 2006 and its connection to Carlo’s visit 3 days earlier.

The postulator responded that while Mount Meer’s experience couldn’t be counted as a canonical miracle because it wasn’t a physical healing or scientifically verifiable phenomenon.

It was noted as significant testimony to Carlo’s spiritual influence and his apparent ability to mediate extraordinary graces even during his lifetime.

Third, I personally have maintained a devotion to Carlo Acudis for the past 18 years.

I pray to him daily, asking his intercession for various needs, but especially thanking him for the role he played in my spiritual restoration.

I keep a photograph of him in my cell.

The iconic image of him wearing a sweatshirt and jeans smiling with that combination of teenage normaly and spiritual depth.

And I sometimes speak to him in prayer as if he were still that 15year-old boy I met in the cloister though I know he’s now participating in the beatotific vision.

Several times over the years, I’ve had what I can only describe as a sense of Carlo’s continuing presence.

Not visually, not audibly, but as an awareness that he remains interested in my spiritual life and continues to intercede for me.

These aren’t dramatic mystical experiences, but gentle intuitions that I’ve learned to trust.

Fourth, Mount Meer has seen a modest but real spiritual renewal in the years since 2006.

Monastic vocations in Ireland have declined dramatically over the past several decades.

Our community of 25 in 2006 was itself a significant decrease from our peak of over 60 monks in the 1960s.

But since Carlos silence, we’ve received seven new vocations.

Three of whom specifically mentioned in their application letters that they had heard about the mystical experience of August 17th, 2006 and felt drawn to a monastery where God had manifested himself so tangibly.

Our community has also developed a deeper appreciation for how God works through unexpected instruments.

Through dying teenagers, through secret alcoholics, he chooses to heal.

Through moments when carefully structured liturgy is suspended because his presence becomes too overwhelming to continue planned prayers.

Today I am 68 years old.

I have been a monk at Mount Meer Abbey for 43 years.

I have been sober from alcohol for 24 years.

And I have been spiritually alive, truly alive, with consistent awareness of God’s presence and love for 18 years, dating from that Thursday evening when a 15-year-old boy’s prophetic embrace bore fruit in a monasterywide mystical experience.

I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if Carlo Audis had not visited Mount Meer in August 2006.

Would I still be going through the motions, praying mechanically, experiencing nothing? Would I have eventually given up and left monastic life? Would I have relapsed into alcoholism? I’ll never know the answers to those questions because Carlo did visit, did embrace me, did prophesy my restoration, and did somehow through his intercession or spiritual influence trigger a mystical experience that transformed not just me but our entire community.

In cersian spirituality, silence is not merely absence of speech.

It is positive reality space where God can be heard where contemplative prayer can deepen where the noise of the world is excluded so the voice of God can be attended to.

For the first 23 years of my monastic life I experienced silence primarily as absence.

Absence of conversation, absence of entertainment, absence of distraction.

And eventually during my years of addiction and spiritual dryness, it became absence of God.

Empty space that I tried desperately to fill with alcohol and later with mechanical observance.

But on August 17th, 2006, I experienced a different kind of silence.

Silence as fullness.

Silence as presence.

Silence so saturated with God that speech became impossible not because it was forbidden by rule but because it was inadequate to the reality we were experiencing.

That kind of silence, what we now call Carlos silence, has not returned to Mount Meer with the same intensity and duration as it appeared that August evening.

We have not again experienced 2-hour suspension of liturgy because of overwhelming divine presence.

But something of it remains.

The memory of it shapes how we approach our daily practice of silence.

We know now with experiential certainty rather than just theological belief that the silence we maintain is not empty space but potential dwelling place of divine presence that at any moment in any prayer the veil might thin and God might become tangibly present again.

And personally, I carry with me always the knowledge that a dying 15-year-old boy whom I met for 10 minutes in a monastery cloister knew my deepest secrets, spoke prophetic words of restoration, embraced me with supernatural knowledge and love, and through his intercession or spiritual influence triggered an experience that healed wounds I thought would never heal.

Carlo Audis visited Mount Meer Abbey in August 2006.

During the final weeks of his life, he toured our closter with a small group of teenagers.

He listened to me explain monastic history.

And then he did something completely unexpected.

He hugged a broken monk and whispered prophetic words of restoration.

Three days later on Thursday, August 17th, 2006, during vespers, something unprecedented happened.

The usual monastic silence was transformed into a different silence, deeper, fuller, charged with tangible divine presence that overwhelmed our entire community and suspended our carefully structured liturgy for two hours.

25 monks experienced it simultaneously.

25 monks were transformed by it.

25 monks bear witness that on that Thursday evening, God visited Mount Meer in a way that had never happened in the monastery’s 174 years of existence.

And it began with an embrace from a dying teenager who somehow knew things he couldn’t naturally know.

Who spoke with prophetic authority about restoration and healing.

Who served as instrument of divine grace even while his own body was failing.

18 years later, we still call it Carlo’s silence.

Not because Carlo created it, but because Carlo prophesied it, precipitated it, made it possible through his intercession or spiritual influence.

In Ireland, a holy teenager embraced the broken monk, and three days later, the entire monastery fell into a silence they had never experienced before.

A silence so full of God that all we could do was remain motionless in his presence, receiving the restoration, healing, and transformation he had promised through the whispered words of a 15-year-old saint.

This is my testimony.

This is what happened.

This is why I believe with certainty born of direct experience that Carlo Autis was and is a saint whose intercession continues to operate with power that transcends the boundaries between life and death between heaven and earth between the secret brokenness of wounded monks and the healing presence of God that can restore what was lost.