NEXT MILLENNIAL SAINT?

 

Our next saint to be, another young man to hopefully one day join the ranks with Sts. Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlos Acuti, is JOE WILSON, a young Scotsman who expressed his profound relationship with the Lord in his personal diary and whose sudden death at the age of 17 in 2011 has inspired many people around the world.

Joe was born in 1994 in the village of Carfin in Lanarkshire, Scotland (a county between Glasgow and Edinburgh).  His parents, Alan and Veronica Wilson, had raised him in the faith along with his younger sister, Angela, for whom Joe had felt a special affection. 

 Joe was known to be a humble and kind young man with a great longing for holiness. In his last year at his Catholic high school, the teacher was giving a religion class about the saints and asked the students: ‘What do you think a saint would be like today?’”

The whole class turned around and pointed to Joe, saying ‘There he is.’

 The strong faith of St. Thérèse of Lisieux  inspired Joe, who found in this saint the strength he needed to serve others, becoming an example of generosity and dedication for his family and all those around him.

A short distance from his house was Carfin Grotto, a place of pilgrimage and shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes, which Joe frequently visited to find the peace he longed for.

This enclave, known as “the Lourdes of Scotland,” witnessed the spiritual growth of the young man, whose friendship with the Lord deepened during his final years. When Joe fell into a coma due to a heart condition, hundreds of people gathered at the shrine to pray for his recovery, holding a candlelight pilgrimage.

Joe died on Dec. 20, 2011, at Wishaw General Hospital, just five days after his 17th birthday, from Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a congenital heart condition that can particularly affect young athletes. His sudden death was a huge shock to his family.

 Among his personal belongings, his father found a diary in which Joe had recorded, since the age of 14, the most intimate details of his spiritual life, with reflections on faith and his search for God that reflected an unusual maturity for his age. “I will always be close to God, because he is the most important thing in my life.”

 The young man expressed his enthusiasm for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Scotland in 2010: “I prayed the rosary on Sunday so that everything would go well and there would be many conversions. Jesus will be on the altar! Or at least, as close to Jesus as we can be on earth, on the altar.”

 “I know the world won’t be perfect, and that’s why I love having faith. Think of all the people who are starving, in wars, in famines; who were excluded, tortured, who weren’t loved in the world. All these people who were unfortunate on earth are, I’m sure, sitting on the highest thrones in heaven. How reassuring is that?” he wrote shortly before his death.

Joe’s life is an example e to all young people, who see it is possible to be a normal person, and, at the same time, become holy.

Will Joe be another millennial saint? While Scotland has a rich heritage of Celtic saints, the last Scottish-born person to be canonized was St. John Ogilvie, a Jesuit priest martyred in Glasgow in 1615 and canonized by Paul VI in 1976.