“To always be close to Jesus, that is my life plan.” Blessed Carlo Acutis
Carlo Acutis was born in London on May 3, 1991 to a wealthy Italian family. When he evinced a precocious interest in religious practice, his questions were answered by the family’s Polish babysitter. He requested to receive his First Communion at the age of seven. After consulting a prelate and providing instruction, the family arranged this. Carlo Acutis had a great devotion to the Eucharist. From a young age, he expressed a special love for God, even though his Catholic parents had stopped attending Mass.
As he grew older, he started going to daily Mass, often dragging his family members along with him. He made Holy Hours before or after Mass and went to confession weekly.
He is said to have had several models as guides for his life, especially Francis of Assisi,[3] as well as Francisco and Jacinta Marto, Dominic Savio, Tarcisius, and Bernadette Soubirous.[3]
On the social side, Acutis would worry about friends of his whose parents were divorcing and would invite them to his home to support them. He defended disabled peers at school when bullies mocked them. Outside school, he did volunteer work with the homeless and destitute. He also liked films, comic editing and playing PlayStation video games. His mother says that he limited his time playing video games to about an hour a week.
Those around him considered him a “computer geek” on account of his passion and skill with computers and the internet. Acutis applied himself to creating a website dedicated to cataloguing each reported Eucharistic miracle in the world. He completed this in 2005, having started compiling the catalogue at the age of eleven. Acutis researched over “136 Eucharistic miracles that occurred over the centuries in different countries around the world, and have been acknowledged by the Church” and collected them into a virtual museum. Besides creating a website to house this virtual museum, he helped create panel presentations that have traveled around the world.
He started the project when he was 11 years old and wrote at the time, “The more Eucharist we receive, the more we will become like Jesus, so that on this earth we will have a foretaste of Heaven.”
He also worked at building a website on Marian apparitions.
When he developed leukemia, he offered his suffering both for Pope Benedict XVI and for the Catholic Church, saying: “I offer to the Lord the sufferings that I will have to undergo for the Pope and for the Church.”[11] He had asked his parents to take him on pilgrimages to the sites of all the known Eucharistic miracles in the world, but his declining health prevented this from happening. The doctors treating his final illness had asked him if he was in great pain, a question to which he responded that “there are people who suffer much more than me”.[4] He died on October 12, 2006 only a week after the diagnosis of fulminating acute promyelocytic leukemia. He was 15 years old. He was buried in Assisi in accordance with his wishes.
On November 14, 2019, the Vatican’s Medical Council of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints expressed a positive opinion about a miracle in Brazil attributed to Acutis’s intercession. Luciana Vianna had taken her son, Mattheus, who was born with a pancreatic defect that made eating difficult, to a prayer service. Beforehand, Vianna had already prayed a novena asking for the teenager Acutis’s intercession. During the service her son had simply asked that he should not “throw up as much”. Immediately following the service, Mattheus told his mother that he felt healed and asked for solid food when he came home. Until then he had been on an all-liquid diet unable to eat solid food. He was eating meat the very next day. After a detailed investigation, Pope Francis confirmed the miracle’s authenticity in a decree on February 21, 2020, leading to Acutis’s beatification On October 10, 2020.