Madden Mischief

If you never saw a teenage Saint in a polo shirt, or posting on social from a cell phone, get ready.   Soon you’ll be asking Blessed Carlo for a lift!  Upward!

Finally, someone who looks like a typical millennial today is enroute to sainthood. 

Pope Leo will canonize Blessed Carlo Acutis, along with Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati tomorrow, Sept. 7.  Frassati defended the Catholic faith against the Communist and Fascist parties in Italy.

His passion for outdoor activities such as mountaineering made him a patron of athletes.  He died in 1925 at age 24, having contracted polio, probably from his service to the sick.

Now, can you tell which statues in the picture above are of Blessed Carlo?  This is how he looked when he died from Leukemia in 2006 when he was just 15 years old.

Still in his signature red polo shirt, Blessed Carlo looks just like other youths today you see running around with cellphones in hand, laptops in their backpacks. 

Soon, he’ll be inspiring other teens to look higher than cell phone towers for guidance, spiritual enlightenment and redemption. The latter for “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). 

Millions of millennials in today’s young Catholic world are destined to identify with their blessed buddy Carlo when he takes that front row seat into sainthood.

Carlo was beatified in 2020 and will now be canonized fittingly at the Vatican, becoming the Catholic Church’s first “millennial” saint.

The Catholic Church has attributed two miracles to the intercession of Carlo Acutis that paved the way for his canonization. One was the miraculous healing of a young girl from a brain hemorrhage, another involved the healing of a young boy in Brazil from a congenital disease impacting his pancreas. 

I was wondering what to blog today when I read in Florida Catholic Media how youth will finally see a saint who looks much like themselves being canonized.

Yep, Carlo was a wiz with computers, social media and all that digital stuff growing up in Assisi where he was no sissy, but one of the guys ever texting and coding. 

For centuries ASSISI, Italy is where pilgrims come to walk in the footsteps of another saint who preached to birds, embraced poverty and wandered the hills barefoot there, Saint Francis of Assisi. 

And now tourists will find the latest model of holiness, a teenager in Nike sneakers who built websites and coded for Christ.

Today there’s a tomb of Blessed Carlo Acutis in the Church of St. Mary Major in Assisi that’s drawing a steady stream of visitors to not just St. Francis’s, but now to Carlo’s tomb too.  Devotees, pilgrim groups and students on school field trips visit Blessed Carlo’s tomb near the site where St. Francis famously stripped off his fine clothing to embrace a life of poverty.

In the cobbled streets leading to the shrine, souvenir shops that once featured only tau crosses and rustic Franciscan statues now prominently display Carlo’s face on refrigerator magnets and figurines in his signature red polo shirt.

Listings on AirBnB advertise their nearness to his tomb, signaling just how quickly Carlo’s presence has become such an enlightening rod in Assisi.  Prior to Pope Leo, Pope Francis had  long thought of Carlo as a model for the digital generation.

In his 2019 exhortation “Christus Vivit,” published after the Synod of Bishops on young people, the pope then wrote that Carlo “knew how to use the new communications technology to transmit the Gospel, to communicate values and beauty.”  At the same time, he resisted “consumerism and distraction” that so often dominates online life. 

Carlo channeled his interest in coding to create a website cataloging Eucharistic miracles worldwide, hoping to share his love for the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist with others.  He was adept at social media too in spreading his uplifting messages.

And may he now be uplifted himself to sainthood.  Go Carlos!  You are the coming of all attractions.  And we await soon to receive your posts from high above.

Tom Madden is adept at spreading messages too once he finds a good story worthy to tell in his word shiny way as the title of one of his books, Wordshine Man which advocates making writing less biting, more inviting.  His latest is Planetary Lifeguard, Blowing the Whistle at Climate Change, and when not writing books or blogs www.maddenmischief.com, he’s managing his cool PR firm, TransMedia Group, along with his dauntless, ever young daughter, Adrienne Mazzone