The relic of St Carlo Acutis, the Church’s first millennial saint will draw pilgrims to St Mary’s Cathedral from 31 July to 5 August, as the relic’s national mission reaches Perth.
The relic is a section of St Carlo’s pericardium, the membrane that encloses and protects the heart, measuring six centimetres by two.
It travels the world under the custodianship of the Diocese of Assisi, accompanied by Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo, whom the Archbishop of Assisi appointed to carry St Carlo’s message and relics abroad.
Australia is the 25th nation to host it, following a New Zealand leg in June.
The International Exhibition of Eucharistic Miracles, which St Carlo himself created travels alongside the relic.
Perth’s place on the itinerary sits between Geraldton and Adelaide, part of a tour that opened in Sydney on 25 June and runs through to late October.
Carlo Acutis was born in London on 3 May 1991 and died of leukaemia in 2006, aged 15.
An ordinary teenager with a real gift for computers, he used it to build an online catalogue of Eucharistic miracles from around the world, and he called the Eucharist his “highway to Heaven.” He had a knack for the memorable line, too.
“All people are born as originals,” he once said, “but many die as photocopies.” Pope Leo XIV canonised him on 7 September 2025, alongside St Pier Giorgio Frassati.
The choice of relic carries its own meaning.
Scripture places the heart at the centre of a person’s inner life, the seat of our love for God: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart” (Dt 6:5). When the side of Jesus was pierced on the Cross, blood and water flowed from his heart, signs the Church reads as the Eucharist and Baptism.
St Carlo built his short life around that same centre.
On the day of his First Holy Communion, aged seven, he told his parents his plan: “Always to be united to Jesus. This is my programme of life.”
He kept to it through five practices: frequent reception of the Eucharist, Eucharistic Adoration, regular confession and spiritual direction, devotion to Our Lady and the saints, and acts of charity.
The Church holds these up as a road open to anyone, the ordinary path to sanctity that St Carlo insisted every person could walk.
Those five steps shape the Perth visit, built around Adoration, veneration of the relic, talks, Mass and Confession.
Monsignor Figueiredo, who has offered reflections at each stop on the tour, has framed the relic as an invitation addressed above all to the young: to stop wasting their lives, and to put God at the centre of what they do.
Perth has welcomed St Carlo before.
In October 2024, while he was still Blessed Carlo Acutis, relics of the teenager drew crowds to St Mary’s Cathedral over several days, with a welcome vigil and Holy Hours shaped around his love of the Eucharist.
That visit brought a relic of his hair. This one brings the major relic of the pericardium, and it comes after his canonisation, the development that placed Australia on a worldwide pilgrimage route.
Preaching to a million young people in Rome at the close of the Jubilee of Youth last August, Pope Leo XIV commended St Carlo’s “programme of life” and urged the young to “aspire to great things, to holiness, wherever you are.”
Full details of the Perth visit, including Mass and service times, are available at stcarloaustralia.com.
From St Mary’s Cathedral the relic travels on to Adelaide.