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ON 27 APRIL, the London-born Italian teenager Carlo Acutis will be made a saint.
To be canonised as a saint in the Church, at least two miracles need to be attributed to a person after their death (you can read more about the miracles attributed to Acutis here).
Acutis, who died in Monza, Italy but was buried in Assisi, has been dubbed “the patron saint of the internet” and “God’s influencer”.
Indeed, God’s Influencer is the title of a short biography on Acutis by Irish priest and author, Fr Michael Collins.
“The title was the publisher’s idea,” said Collins. “He thought that was a clever trick – I wouldn’t have gone for that but that’s neither here nor there.”
Collins said he was “asked out of the blue” if he would like to write a book on Acutis, having authored many books on the Church and several popes.
“Are you mad?” came the reply from Collins. “I’m 64, I’d be way too old, you need somebody younger.”
However, he said his “arm was twisted into giving it a go”.
Collins told The Journal that the book was always going to be short given that Acutis “died at 15, so he didn’t do much”.
This is something that can irk those behind campaigns to make other people saints.
For example, Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati was an anti-fascist mountain-climber who died aged just 24. (After the recognition of a miracle, people receive the title of ‘Blessed’ and can then be venerated by their local church).
Speaking to The Economist, Wanda Gawronska, the 97-year-old niece of Frassati, remarked: “Why are you interested in Acutis? There’s nothing interesting about him.”
However, Collins said that “everybody has their own life span”.
“What grabbed my attention was, that within his 15 years, he didn’t achieve a huge amount, but what he did, he did with such sincerity.
“He had little sayings such as: ‘We are born originals, but so many of us die photocopies.’”
Collins said he started writing the short biography on Acutis as a “balanced outsider” and that over time, “many of the things in him resonated in my own life”.
“I was more drawn into the story and was fascinated,” said Collins.
“How could a kid at the age of 15 be respected by so many of his contemporaries and then why would the Church waste their time doing an investigation into his life to see if there was something supernatural about his life.
“That’s basically what the whole canonisation story is: Did they really live an exemplary life as best they could within their own human limitations?”
The investigation into sainthood is a costly business, with an estimated cost of around €500,000 on average.
A number of people with knowledge of the process have alleged that up until recently, candidates who were backed by wealthy donors were more likely to have a decision made on their sainthood, while other causes were left to languish.
“It costs a lot to get lawyers and doctors and all the people you need to interview,” said Collins, “and it was often that saints came from convents and religious orders with money behind them.”
“Pope Francis decided that money is not to be an object in anybody’s examination,” said Collins.
Meanwhile, Collins said he was interested in how despite coming from a “very wealthy background”, Acutis would “bring food to the people sleeping rough on the streets”.
“And it wasn’t just leftovers he was bringing, but he was actually cooking for them.”
Many of the homeless people Acutis helped in his life ended up coming to the teenager’s funeral.
There was a 65-year period in the Church following the Reformation in the 1500s, which marked the beginning of Protestantism, in which no new saints were canonised.
But then came Pope John Paul II, who streamlined the process and canonised 483 saints – there had only been 300 or so canonisations in the previous 600 years.
This led some people to dub the Vatican a “saint factory”.
Pope Francis has gone one better, and has so far canonised 942 saints.
“John Paul II expressed an idea that we need to canonise ordinary people who also lived good, exemplary lives, not just nuns and priests and bishops,” said Collins.
He added that Francis is a “wily old fox” when it comes to canonisations
“First of all, Acutis’s family was from where Francis’s family were from in Piedmont, in the north of Italy.
“It’s a bit like if you come from Ballyconnell, and there’s a kid down the road who’s going to be a saint, you might be more interested than if you came from Paris.”
When asked if there is a PR element to making Acutis a saint, Collins said: “Francis took an interest in the story and then there was an element of, here’s a young kid who has lived an extraordinary life.”
And on the criteria to become a saint – two posthumous miracles – Collins said this causes “some people to scratch their heads”.
“I’m not too keen on the miracle side of it, to be frank.
“If you’re a good person, that doesn’t mean you’re a goody-two-shoes, you could still curse, and you could still lose your temper.”
Collins remarked that Acutis’s classmates – now in their mid-30s – all report that he was “just a normal kid”.
“He was the practical joker of the class and never had his homework done on time.
“One of the teachers said, ‘If I knew that I was giving out to a saint…’”
Collins added: “His mother is the chief source of information about him, but I think there’s an element that maybe his mother may be not telling the whole story”.
Antonia often speaks publicly about the impact her son has had on her life, but the devout picture she paints of him can at times differ to that given by his peers.
Acutis is known to have loved The Simpsons, but when Antonia was asked about this by a journalist, she replied: “He had no time to watch television. He was teaching catechism, each day going to Mass.
“And then the prayers. And then all the good works he did… That took up a lot of time.”
She describes her son as her “saviour” and that it was his devotion to Catholicism that made her rediscover her own faith.
“Sometimes people who are born-again Catholics, they’re very serious about their faith, and very dedicated,” said Collins.
While he said this is “very impressive” he also recalled meeting a family in Nashville, Tennessee who had converted to Catholicism.
“I made a couple of cracks which they didn’t think were funny so I kept my mouth shut, because they take it a lot more seriously than cradle Catholics do.”
Collins added that “we probably don’t know the whole story about Acutis”.
“There is an element that when you turn somebody into a Saint, you kind of turn them into a plastic statue.
“That’s the only thing that I don’t like about it and I think it’s important to say that he was just a normal kid who got a dreadful diagnosis at the age of 15.”
Collins is a school chaplain and remarked that “you can see the maturing and growing year by year”.
“They leave school in June and come back in September as almost a different child, people change.
“That was an interesting question I was thinking about during the book: What would he have been like when he hit 18? Would he have dropped off the tree, who knows?”
Collins said Acutis “had a different way of doing things but I don’t think he’s unique”.
“There’s an awful lot of lovely kids who never get recognised for what they do.
“They should really be standing up with Carlo on the day of the canonisation, and they should take a bow themselves.
“But they won’t, because they won’t know who they are, because they won’t see it within themselves.”
Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo currently serves in the Diocese of Assisi, which is where Acutis is buried.
He is one of the guardian-porters who travels to different countries with Acutis’s relics, and this relic came to Ireland in 2023.
A statue of the teenager was also commissioned for St Eugene’s Cathedral in Derry.
Figueiredo said he was inundated with requests from bishops in Ireland to bring the relic to their dioceses and remarked: “I think they see Carlo as this young kid who is kind of bringing new hope into a country and a Church that has been stained by abuse of young kids.”
When asked if this is part of the cause for the excitement regarding the canonisation of Acutis in Ireland, Collins reflected on his time as a priest.
“When I was ordained 40 years ago, it was a very different Church.
“In the first parish I served in, we had 40 altar servers. We didn’t have a notion about any of these scandals that were going on at the time.”
Collins said he only became aware of the abuse scandals in around 1996.
“That was more or less when it came out in the media, because the bishops certainly weren’t telling us, that was all swept under the carpet.
“It was shocking and really awful, and it was so toxic and scandalous and repulsive.
“So that’s a roundabout answer to your question – I think it is nice to see that here is a kid who actually got on well in his Jesuit school and got on very well with the priests in his parish.”
He also noted that there is a huge devotion to Acutis in Brazil, which has a very young Catholic population, and also in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, Collins said he is very interested in how Pope Francis might approach the canonisation, given his recent health troubles.
“I think he certainly won’t attend the Mass for the whole thing, he wouldn’t be able to and it would be crazy for him to do so.
“But something I was curious about was, will he actually do the canonisation by webcam over the internet?
“Carlo Autis made a website about Eucharistic miracles and I was wondering if Francis might actually declare the formula of canonisation over the internet. That would be really cool.”
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