By Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The greatest risk in life is to waste it by not seeking to follow God’s plan, Pope Leo XIV said, proclaiming two new saints — two young laymen of the 20th and 21st centuries. “Sts. Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis are an invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upward and make them masterpieces,” the pope said at a packed canonization Mass in Rome Sept. 7. “The simple but winning formula of their holiness,” he said, is accessible to everyone at any time. “They encourage us with their words: ‘Not I, but God,’ as Carlo used to say. And Pier Giorgio: ‘If you have God at the center of all your actions, then you will reach the end.'” In his homily, the pope underlined Jesus’ call in the day’s Gospel reading “to abandon ourselves without hesitation to the adventure that he offers us, with the intelligence and strength that comes from his Spirit, that we can receive to the extent that we empty ourselves of the things and ideas to which we are attached, in order to listen to his word.” That is what the two new saints did and what every disciple of Christ is called to do, he said. The saints of the church are often portrayed as “great figures, forgetting that for them it all began when, while still young, they said ‘yes’ to God and gave themselves to him completely, keeping nothing for themselves,” the pope said.