Yesterday morning, under a cloudless Roman sky, Pope Leo XIV proclaimed to a crowd in St Peter’s Square that an Italian teenager who played Super Mario Kart on his Nintendo Game Boy had joined the communion of saints in heaven. The canonisation of Carlo Acutis, who died from leukaemia aged 15 in 2006, has generated terrific excitement in the Catholic Church. One almost feels sorry for St Pier Giorgio Frassati, a campaigner for the poor raised to the altars in the same ceremony. Although, like St Carlo, he was a handsome young man who cut a dashing figure smoking a pipe while mountaineering, he died a hundred years ago, from polio at the age of 24. As someone joked on social media, Frassati is the saintly equivalent of CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley, who both had the misfortune to expire on the same day as President John F Kennedy.
What makes the case of Carlo Acutis so remarkable is the combination of youth and speed. The first millennial saint would be only 34 years old if he were alive today, the 19th anniversary of his death. His parents were in the congregation yesterday. “Carlo met Jesus in his family, thanks to his parents Andrea and Antonia,” said Pope Leo. That was a generous form of words. When Carlo was born, his father Andrea was working in London for the investment bank Lazard; neither he nor his wife Antonia were practising Catholics, and it was only the piety of their son that drew them back to the Church. At the time, Carlo was the wealthy couple’s only child. On the fourth anniversary of his death, Antonia gave birth to the twins Francesca and Michele; the latter gave the first reading at the canonisation Mass, speaking in natively fluent English. A popular image on Instagram shows Carlo, halo shining, with his arms around the siblings he never met.
The notion of a millennial saint, photogenic in his polo shirt and Ray-Bans, has proved irresistible to the secular media. Most Catholics are delighted. But, like every major event in a shrinking Western Church scarred by scandal and online factional warfare, it is tinged with controversy. The convergence of modernity and tradition in Carlo’s life has created a legacy that is unsettling as well as exhilarating. Many Northern European Catholics are unenthusiastic about the permanent exhibition of saints’ dead bodies; Carlo lies in a glass tomb in Assisi, at first glance incorrupt, though in fact his apparently flawless complexion is a silicone mask concealing what the Church admits are “normal signs of decay”. And some Italian Catholics, though accustomed to such exhibitions, think it was disrespectful to dress the boy in jeans and Nike trainers. But, honestly, it is difficult to get these things right. There is no precedent for the cult of a style-conscious computer geek.
“The notion of a millennial saint, photogenic in his polo shirt and Ray-Bans, has proved irresistible to the secular media.”
A more fundamental controversy has been generated by the new saint’s personal faith — which, unlike his sartorial tastes, was impervious to fashion. Carlo Acutis’s Catholicism was rooted in the Eucharist: not just the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass, which is common to all flavours of Catholic spirituality, but the practice of kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. The modernists who seized control of the Church’s liturgy after the Second Vatican Council regarded Eucharistic Adoration as a superstitious relic of the Middle Ages or, worse, sugary 19th-century piety. They and their successors have watched incredulously as a new generation of Catholics have embraced Adoration, falling to their denim-covered knees as the sacrament, encased in a richly ornamented monstrance, processes through the streets. Sales of mantillas or “Mass veils” for young women are through the roof; engaged couples, chaste until marriage and hoping for large families, cross themselves every time they pass a Catholic church.
Even before yesterday, Carlo Acutis, who coded websites celebrating the Eucharist and its associated miracles, was an unofficial patron saint of Generation Z traditionalists, many of whom attend the traditional Latin Mass that Pope Francis unsuccessfully tried to stamp out. St Carlo did not: he died the year before Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, later torn up by his successor, liberated the old rite for young people bored by the dreary folksiness of “youth Masses”. Yet the liturgical civil war that followed Francis’s 2021 document Traditionis Custodes, which attempted to drive the Latin Mass out of parishes, nonetheless cast a shadow over last weekend’s celebrations.
Andrea Grillo, a professor at the Pontifical Academy of St Anselm in Rome, was an influential lay adviser to the Argentinian pope; he is often described as “the mind behind the motu proprio” – that is, Francis’s brutal, and brutally enforced, restrictions on the old rite. Grillo has often written savagely against the traditional Mass. But last June he found a new target: the then Blessed Carlo Acutis. Writing in the journal Munera, he asked: “How is it possible that a young Blessed can communicate a Eucharistic theology so old, so heavy, so obsessive, so focused on the inessential …?” This “young ardent communicator”, he wrote, had a deficient, defective and one-sided understanding of the sacrament. A visit to Carlo’s website confirmed him in his view that the teenager manifested a “distorted fixation on Eucharistic miracles”.
The significance of Grillo’s polemic lay not so much in its venom but in his exalted position at the court of Pope Francis. This is not to say that the late pontiff shared his contemptuous view of Carlo Acutis. After all, it was Francis who — appreciating his popularity and reassured that he was untainted by the old Missal — would have canonised Carlo in April if he had not himself gone to meet his maker. What the Munera diatribe illustrated was the grip of the hard Left on the Bergoglio pontificate. Put bluntly, Francis knew that Grillo was a nasty piece of work, and it did not bother him.
In the act of canonising Saints Piergiorgio and Carlo, Pope Leo displayed a perfect dignity that may yet develop into much-needed papal charisma. What remains to be seen is whether he grasps the extent to which, over the past 12 years, the institutions of the Church have been infiltrated by secular lobbyists. In this respect, it is not Sunday’s ceremony that matters so much as what happened on Saturday, when gay activists wearing T-shirts reading “Fuck the Rules” processed into St Peter’s Basilica as part of a papally-sanctioned LGBT pilgrimage. The contrast between the two events could not have been greater.
Leo can hardly attribute the scandal caused by the activists to homophobia; if he ponders the sequence of events that led up to it, and he is a deeply reflective man, perhaps he will realise that his own naïvety is partly to blame. In private he has promised to “bring peace to the Church”. Despite the joyful mood yesterday, there are frustratingly few signs that the healing has begun. Perhaps a prayer to St Carlo Acutis is in order.
