Carlo Acutis: The Life of the First Millennial Saint

For this reason, Carlo Acutis dedicated a large part of his life to researching and publicizing Eucharistic miracles—events inexplicable by science and reason that usually involve the consecrated species. Some of the best-known Eucharistic miracles involve accounts of the transformation of consecrated hosts into human flesh and blood. In the words of Antonia Salzano, these miracles serve to demonstrate the "real presence" of God in the Eucharist—and not a symbolic presence, as bread and wine are understood in Protestant theology. Fascinated by these supernatural events, Acutis dedicated himself to reading about them, researching them, and publicizing them.

"I weigh 70 kilos and I'm destined to die." Carlo Acutis was two months away from his death, and nothing indicated that this would be the outcome of the Italian teenager's short life—but Acutis seemed to already know his fate when he recorded himself saying those words. As Ricardo Figueiredo writes in his book about Acutis, whenever someone asked him about the future, the young man would reply: "Yes, if we're still alive tomorrow or the day after, because I can't guarantee how many years we'll live, because only God knows the future."

Despite his youth, Carlo Acutis seemed unafraid of death, according to his parents. On the other hand, he worried deeply about the possibility of dying at any moment and that any day of his life could be his last, as he wanted his soul to always be "immaculate and ready to meet God." Therefore, he dedicated time every day to Mass, confession, and prayer.

The end of Carlo Acutis's short life came quickly at a time when he was devoting special attention to Portugal for his studies on Eucharistic miracles. In the summer of 2005, Acutis visited Portugal to visit the church of the Eucharistic miracle in Santarém. The young man wanted to learn more about a famous 13th-century story to include in his documentation on Eucharistic miracles. According to tradition , in 1266, a poor woman from Santarém who was being mistreated and betrayed by her husband asked a witch for help to end her suffering. The witch told her she could remedy the situation, but to do so, she needed a consecrated host.

The woman then went to the church of Santo Estêvão in Santarém to confess and receive communion. At that moment, she discreetly removed the host from her mouth to take it, wrapped in her veil, to the witch. However, the story goes that suddenly, blood began to ooze from the veil. The woman ran home and sealed the host in a chest. That night, with her husband back home, the two reportedly saw "mysterious rays of light" emerge from the chest—and spent the night in adoration before the host. The local parish priest was informed of the strange occurrence, and the miraculous host was taken to the church and placed in a wax monstrance. Almost a century later, the monstrance was found completely destroyed—and the host was found in a small crystal vial, the origin of which was completely unknown. This vial is still on display today in a gilded silver monstrance in that church.

The church of Santo Estêvão, currently renamed the Sanctuary of the Most Holy Miracle, would become a place of pilgrimage visited by figures such as Queen Saint Isabel and King Afonso VI.

These were the kinds of stories that fascinated Carlo Acutis. In the summer of 2005, the young man visited that church and also visited other places in Portugal, such as Lisbon, Alcobaça, and, unsurprisingly, Fátima. Later, Acutis also delved into the phenomenon of Fátima (which also has the dimension of a Eucharistic miracle with the appearance of the angel in 1916). According to Father Ricardo Figueiredo, Carlo Acutis dedicated the summer of 2006 to reading Sister Lúcia's Memoirs , specifically during a trip he took to Lourdes with his family.

It was at the end of that summer that Acutis began to show "some strange health signs," the priest recalls. According to his mother, the illness was initially disguised as flu-like symptoms: it was October, and most of Carlo Acutis's schoolmates had coughs and other similar symptoms. The family didn't realize what was happening until the day Carlo "woke up and couldn't move." His parents took him to the hospital, and upon arrival, Acutis declared, "I'm not leaving this hospital alive."

In early October, he was diagnosed with fulminant leukemia. He died within a week. During those days of profound suffering, when asked if he was suffering, he would reply that "there are people suffering more," his mother recalls. Rushed to an intensive care unit, he told his parents that he offered his suffering "for the Church and the Pope, so as not to go to Purgatory and go directly to Heaven," recalls Father Ricardo Figueiredo. At the end of his life, he is said to have said: "I am happy to die, because in my life I have not wasted a single moment on things that displeased God."

Carlo Acutis died in the early hours of October 12, 2006, at the age of 15. According to his own wishes, he was buried in Assisi, a city that Acutis, a devotee of Saint Francis, loved and where he often spent part of his vacations. The idea that a future saint lay there quickly spread throughout northern Italy. "Carlo's first miracles occurred at his funeral," his mother recounted . "There was a woman who had breast cancer. She had already undergone a histological examination, and they told her she would need to start chemotherapy soon. She prayed to Carlo on the day of the funeral Mass, and the tumor disappeared."

The reputation of Carlo Acutis's holiness began to grow, "initially very limited to the Milan area," recalls Ricardo Figueiredo. Then, devotion to the young Italian became international—until it became inevitable that the Catholic Church would move forward with the process to investigate whether or not he was eligible for sainthood. As Ricardo Figueiredo explains, it was necessary to wait the usual five years after death for the process to be opened—and, in 2018, the Vatican took the first step toward Acutis's canonization by advancing the declaration of the young Italian's heroic virtues. That is, the declaration that Acutis lived the virtues of the Christian faith in an extraordinary way. This process involved consulting family members, friends, classmates, and others who knew Carlo Acutis and who testified to how the young man brought them closer to the Christian faith.

From then on, says the priest, there was a "great boom in publicizing his life." In just a few years, Carlo Acutis's name became a symbol of Catholic youth worldwide, gaining special prominence at World Youth Day—he was patron saint, for example, of the 2023 edition in Lisbon—and becoming a kind of "holy sensation," in the words of Ricardo Figueiredo, contributing decisively to boosting the Catholic Church's relationship with today's youth.

"If we go back 100 years, we see that the great sensation saint was Saint Therese of the Child Jesus. There are several churches with images of her. She had the language necessary for that time, for the social transformations of the transition from the 19th to the 20th century," recalls Ricardo Figueiredo, emphasizing that there was a "spiritual reaction" to these transformations with Jansenism and the "closing of the Church's bastions," placing "a weight and a moral burden on Catholicism, which made salvation very distant." In contrast, Saint Therese "spoke of spiritual childhood," saying that the faithful should "abandon themselves into the arms of God as a child abandons itself into the hands of its parents."

Likewise, “Carlo Acutis appears in a time marked by materialism, by the digital world, in which it seems so difficult to be a saint, and he becomes the sensation saint”.

Over the years following the declaration of heroic virtues, the cause for the beatification of Carlo Acutis advanced to the next phase: the investigation of possible miracles attributed to the intercession of the young Italian, a necessary condition for the beatification and canonization of a saint.