On Sunday 7 September, Pope Leo XIV will declare London-born Carlo Acutis the Catholic Church’s first Millennial saint. Acutis, a computer prodigy who died in 2006 at the age of 15, is a real saint for our times. His commitment to the fundamental truths of Catholicism, particularly his deep devotion to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, are an inspiration to this and future generations of young people.
Bishop Nicholas Hudson, Episcopal Secretary for the Bishops’ Conference, will be in Rome to celebrate the Canonisation. He writes a personal reflection on Carlo Acutis and explains his close ties with the Catholic Church in this country.
Carlo Acutis has deep London roots. He was born in the Portland Clinic, close to Oxford Circus, on 3 May 1991, and was baptised in the church of Our Lady of Dolours, Fulham Road, fifteen days later. His grandparents, Carlo Acutis and Maria Perlowska, were married in Westminster Cathedral in 1963 – the Cathedral recently discovered their entry in its Marriage Register.
When he was just four months old, his family moved to Milan. From a very young age, he expressed an interest in Jesus and in visiting the Blessed Sacrament reserved in churches. He was so keen to make his First Holy Communion that he was given permission to make it early. This strengthened his desire to go to Mass every day. After some years of receiving daily, he said, “The more we receive the Eucharist, the more we will become like Jesus, so that on this earth we will have a foretaste of heaven.” He also said, “The Eucharist is my highway to heaven!”
His mother Antonia, by her own admission, was not a regular Mass-goer, but Carlo’s love for the Eucharist encouraged her return to Mass; and she found she loved it. Carlo was so full of questions that she decided she had better do some studying. She loved that too. It is a wonderful example of a child evangelising his mother.
But no one should think Carlo was the shy, retiring type. You need only search online for images and videos of him to see he was often the life and soul of the party. He played every sport from karate to swimming to football; he loved his dogs; he taught himself the saxophone. He enjoyed Spiderman and Batman; Gameboy and GameCube; PlayStation and Xbox. He was given his first computer at nine; and was soon begging his mother for books on how to code – quickly mastering C++, Java and 3D animation. He rationed his time on computer games to just a few hours a week – to apply his skills rather to creating a website on Eucharistic miracles. This is still online today.
He would always help any friend with their homework – especially if it involved using a computer. Riding around the local streets on his broken bike, he was known to be generous and kind-hearted. He would be seen in the supermarket paying for people who did not have quite enough money; and carrying old ladies’ shopping home.
At school, he was very amusing in class – amusing, his friends said, but never unkind. He had a reputation for defending the underdog and had a particular care for those with disabilities: he believed they were especially close to God. He would look out for anyone who was being bullied; and for those whose parents were separating: he would ask his mother if he could invite them round to cheer them up.
If he had a heart for those who suffered, he was also developing a heart for the poor. One of his favourite sayings was from St Mother Theresa: “Many talk about the poor,” she would say, “but few talk to the poor.” Carlo was well known for befriending them. His mother got used to him asking her what clothes they might spare for the man or woman on the street. She says their garage was like a domestic charity store – full of containers Carlo had put there with things for the needy: sleeping-bags, scarves and gloves. If he walked past a poor man’s bedding, he would leave a sandwich and a 5 Euro note.
“What do you think?” he would say. “Is God more pleased with a service like this, generous and tireless, to the least ones of this world, or with prayer?”
“A life will be really beautiful,” he once said, “if we come to love God above all things and our neighbour as ourselves.” He had a spiritual wisdom well beyond his years. This was recognised by the Parish Priest who made him a catechist – a teacher of the faith – at 11. “God has written a unique and unrepeatable story for each of us,” Carlo would tell the young people he catechised, “but he lets us write the ending.” “Everyone is born an original but many die as photocopies.”
He was clear that he wanted to be a saint. “The only thing we have to ask for in prayer,” he would say, “is the desire to be holy.” After his First Holy Communion, he declared: “Always to be united with Jesus: this is my programme for life.”
We know Carlo sensed, from a young age, that he wouldn’t live a long life. “I’m destined to die young,” he said to camera after finding he had ballooned in weight. But he was in no doubt that it would be to go and be with Jesus. Of Jesus’s promise – “anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood … I shall raise up on the last day” – he was utterly convinced. “Something extraordinary happens to us … in eternal life,” he would say. “Death is the start of new life.”
Yet, at the same time, he was under no illusion about suffering. On his deathbed he told his mother, “Mamma, Golgotha is for everyone. No one escapes the cross.”
“I’m not getting out of here alive,” he warned her the day he was admitted to hospital. He chose there and then to offer his suffering and death for three entities: for Jesus, for the Church and for Pope Benedict. When his doctor asked him, “Carlo, are you in pain?” his response was, “There are many people suffering much more pain than me.” He died the next day, on 12 October 2006. He was not yet 16 years old.
His funeral was packed – not only with friends, family and classmates but the countless poor people of the locality whom, unbeknown to his family and friends, he had befriended.
It was in the presence of a relic of Carlo that a miracle was wrought that enabled him to be declared ‘Blessed’. It happened on 12 October 2013, on the 7th anniversary of Carlo’s death. Fr Marcelo Tenorio, Parish Priest of a small Brazilian parish, had given Carlo’s father a picture of Our Lady Aparecida to place in Carlo’s bedroom. Fr Marcelo prayed that, with Mary’s help, a miracle might happen in his parish through Carlo’s intercession. Meanwhile, Fr Marcelo brought to his parish a relic of Carlo given him by Antonia.
On that day, Fr Marcelo held a special Mass at the end of which he invited the people to come forward and venerate the relic. Among them was four-year-old Matheus, who was accompanied by his grandfather. Matheus suffered from annular pancreas, a disease which made him vomit continually, so much so that he became weaker and weaker and desperately light. His body rejected everything he ate and drank. Queuing up with his grandfather, he said, “What shall I pray for?” “Ask to stop vomiting,” his grandfather said.
And so he did: when it came to his turn, little Matheus held up the relic and said, “Stop vomiting.” On the way home, Matheus said he felt he had been cured. The proof was that, once home, he asked immediately for chips, rice, beans and steak – all his brothers’ favourite foods – and ate the lot without once vomiting. Nor has he ever vomited since. His ill-formed pancreas is now completely regular; and the doctors cannot explain the change. It was the miracle that opened the door to Carlo’s Beatification seven years later. Since then, there has been a further miracle in Italy, which allowed Pope Francis to decide Blessed Carlo should now be canonised.
Antonia tells the story of a dream she had a few days before he died, as she slept beside him on the floor. She dreamt she was in a church with St Francis of Assisi alongside her. Suddenly she saw the face of Carlo – very large – in the ceiling vault; and she heard St Francis tell her that Carlo would become very important in the Church.
When his parents were told Carlo’s heart had stopped, they went to tell his grandmother. She said she knew – because Carlo had already appeared to her to tell her he was in heaven with the angels; and very happy. “Don’t cry, Nonna,” he told her. “I will always be beside you.”
To those who ask him, Carlo seems to wish to come close alongside. Many of the young people who fill St Peter’s Square in Rome on 7 September will testify themselves to feeling a relationship with Carlo, asking him daily for help and protection.
In London Catholics will gather a few days later, at 3pm on 13 September, with Cardinal Vincent Nichols in the church where Carlo was baptised on the Fulham Road for a Mass of Thanksgiving to God for London’s newest saint.
You can watch an EWTN documentary on Carlo Acutis. Bishop Nicholas Hudson features, talking about Carlo’s London roots, 28m 45s into the piece.
