Who is Blessed Carlo Acutis and why the Philippines has a special place in his heart?

The young Acutis was an average student who received his middle school education at the Marcelline Tommaseo Institute and entered high school at the Jesuit Instituto Leone XIII. However, his interest in computer science led him to manage his parish’s website.

Acutis was 12 years old when he became a catechist at the Santa Maria Segreta, a parish that relies on young team leaders for its catechetical structure. As a wide reader, he showed an interest in the lives of saints, especially Francis of Assisi, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, Dominic Savio, Tarcisius, Bernadette Soubirous, and Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi. With his combined skills and interests, he created a website to promote volunteering in the parish.

By utilising technology to catechise, Acutis was able to inspire and inculcate faith among his fellow teenagers. He catalogued each reported Eucharistic miracle in the world and listed approved Marian apparitions. The website was launched in 2004, and he worked on it for two and a half years until he died of leukaemia.

Acutis’s website project, miracolieucaristici.org, was unveiled at the Church of San Carlo Borromeo on October 4, 2006, coinciding with the celebration of the Feast of St Francis. He was then confined at the hospital and was on the brink of his death. The exhibition was also presented at his high school. The website still exists, is accessible on five continents, and has been translated into many languages, including Filipino.

The development of his illness was abrupt. It started with an inflammation of the throat on October 1 and later progressed, which led to intense pain and blood in his urine. On October 8, he was already too weak to go to Mass. He was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukaemia and had little chance of recovery in the clinic was brought into that specialises in blood diseases. He was transferred to the San Gerardo Hospital, north of Milan, and was given the sacrament of the anointing of the sick by the hospital’s chaplain.

Acutis said that he offered his suffering for Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church “in order not to go to purgatory but to go straight to heaven”. His deep love for the Eucharist inspired a profound conversion in his parents, who were later consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Read more: Marian shrine in Antipolo named as the Philippines’ first international shrine

Acutis was fond of animals, cats and dogs in particular, which he featured in his funny videos when he was alive. Arguably, he was the first “influencer” among Catholic saints for using the Internet as a tool for evangelisation. He liked playing football, learned to play the saxophone on his own, and was able to establish strong relationships.

In the book Carlo Acutis: A Millennial in Paradise by Fr Will Conquer, the parish priest of Santa Maria Segretta remembered his vibrant life by commenting, “Carlo was a young man who was exceptionally transparent. He really wanted to progress in loving his parents, God, his classmates, and those who loved him less. He wanted to apply himself in his studies to educate himself in his catechism class as well as in school and computer science.”

In an interview video posted by the Facebook community Friends of Blessed Carlo Acutis Philippines, his mother Antonia said, “Carlo loved very much the Philippines because it is a very Catholic country, where the faith is very big and... it is a nation full of saints. Also, when he was small, he had a friend, Loren Jean. She was from the Philippines, and she was one of his best friends. So he had a special predilection to the Philippines.”

In a flyer distributed by sign.org, snippets of Carlo’s life based on books written by Fr Will Conquer and Nicola Gori stated that “he was always eager to share [what he learned] with others. He would never brag about what he knew or about his possessions. He was indifferent to fashion.” With his upbringing, he spent holidays in Assisi, which he confided to his spiritual father as the place where he was happiest. “His many friendships were chaste. He did not support familiarities between young people of the opposite sex, nor premarital cohabitation. He was faithful to the Church and her teachings, especially in matters of sexuality and family morals. During a discussion about abortion during a religion class, Carlo stood up for human life, stating that an embryo is a human being from conception, and that abortion was homicide,” also mentioned in the flyer.

In view of the beatification process of Acutis, his body that was buried in Assisi was exhumed in June 2018 and was found intact. In April 2019, his remains were transferred to the Franciscan shrine of the Spoliation. Today, Acutis’s tomb is located in Assisi’s Sanctuary of the Renunciation, a part of the Church of St Mary Major, and is open for veneration.

In the reopening of Acutis’s tomb to the public, the bishop of Assisi, Domenico Sorrentino, clarified that Acutis’s body, though intact, “was found in the normal state of transformation typical of the cadaveric condition”. Therefore, he was not “incorrupt”, as many have initially believed.

On February 21, 2020, a miracle attributed to his intercession was officially recognised: the humanly inexplicable healing of a Brazilian child who had a serious and fatal malformation of the pancreas in 2010. And recently, on May 23, Pope Francis attributed a second miracle during a meeting with the head of the Vatican’s saint-making department, Cardinal Marcello Semararo. The miracle was the healing of a university student in Florence who had a brain bleed after suffering head trauma. Now, his sainthood process advances together with six other Catholics.

Blessed Carlo Acutis was named one of the patrons at the recent World Youth Day celebrations in Lisbon, Portugal.

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