Philip the Deacon and Saint Nunzio Sulprizio

On Thursday night, May 5, I went to Mass in Dulce Nombre. Before Mass, I had a meeting with a few people to begin to form a committee to oversee a new project of workshops on trades for young people.

The Mass was to celebrate the feast of Saint Nunzio Sulprizio, who is remembered in one of the murals in a side chapel in the church. I also ended up preaching.

We used the readings of the Easter weekday. The first reading (Acts 8:26-40) was the encounter of Philip the deacon with the Ethiopian eunuch.

Philip was among the seven, chosen with Stephen, to serve the incipient Christian community in responding to the needs of the non-Jewish members who had felt that their orphans and widows were not sufficiently cared for. 

Other than Stephen, only the work of Philip is told in the Acts of the Apostles. He goes to a Samaritan city and is then called to accompany an Ethiopian official, returning home after a visit to Jerusalem. He reaches out to those on the margins, those rejected by the authorities – the Samaritans, an Ethiopian, a eunuch. And he brings them to faith.

The encounter of Philip and the Ethiopian is emblematic: Philip asks “Do you understand what you are reading?” The Ethiopian official responds, “How can I, unless someone instructs me?”

Who helps us understand the scripture? Who instructs us?

We cannot understand the scriptures alone. The scriptures are spoken to a people, and we need the people, the assembly, the church to help us understand. This does not mean that one person might not be the voice through which God gives us a newer, deeper, and broader understanding of His Word. 

In this passage, Philip as representative of the community helps the Ethiopian to understand the scriptures and to lead him to baptism.

In our days we also need the community to help us understand the scriptures and the call of God in our lives – in the liturgy, in the sacraments, and through others in the community, bishops, priests, deacons, religious, catechists, delegates.

But we also need the witness of the saints to help us understand the scriptures.

Saint Nunzio Sulprizio, whose died on May 5, 1936, can help us understand the mystery of suffering, the mystery reflected in the passage of Isaiah which the Ethiopian official was reading.

Barely 19 years old this young man had experienced much suffering in his short life. 

Orphaned as an infant, his grandmother raised him and nurtured him in the faith, She died when he was nine.

A brutal uncle took him in and had him work in his blacksmith shop. He treated him brutally, worked him cruelly, and hardly gave him enough to eat.

Nunzio developed gangrene in one of his legs and had to spend four months in a hospital. Another uncle found out about his nephew’s plight and took Nunzio to stay with a friend of his, a colonel who took care of Nunzio and provided him the medical care and the love he needed.

His uncle’s friend found a place for him in the hospital for the incurables in Naples. There he prepared for and received his first communion.

In the hospital Nunzio did not sit back and feel sorry for himself. He ended up evangelizing the others in his own way, preparing some children for their first communion.

His patient suffering and his care for other sick young people show us a way to respond to illness.

He was later found to have bone cancer which contributed to his death at an early age.

Meditating on his life, his patient disposition, and his life and death we can begin to understand even better the passage of Isaiah that the Ethiopian was reading:

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opened not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. 

Nunzio suffered not only the physical effects of gangrene and cancer, but also the emotional effects of being an orphan, of being abused and maltreated. 

How many young people suffer like him.

Saint Nunzio can help us understand how to live, how to face suffering, and how to die. He can also inspire us to work for and with the ill, the victims of violence and abuse, the young who are abandoned and abused. 

Saint Nunzio was canonized in October 2018, in the same Mass where Pope Francis canonized Monseñor Óscar Romero and Pope Paul VI (who had beatified Nunzio).