EXCLUSIVE: Relics of millennial saint coming to Perth

11 Oct 2024

By The Record

The body of Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006, is pictured at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Assisi, Italy on 3 October 2020. The Italian teen, who had a great love for the Eucharist, is soon to be canonised. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

Perth Catholics will this month have the unique opportunity to venerate the relic of upcoming and soon-to-be teen saint Carlo Acutis.

The relic will be on display at St Mary’s Cathedral from Saturday 19 October to Thursday 24 October. In addition to the usual Masses at 8am at 12.10pm, the Cathedral will also conduct additional special liturgies with Holy Hour and talks.

Born in London, England, on 3 May 1991, to Andrea Acutis and Antonia Salzano, Carlo Acutis was an average teen with an above-average knack for computers.

Before his death from leukemia in 2006, he put that knowledge to use by creating an online database of eucharistic miracles around the world.

In May this year, Pope Francis formally recognised a miracle attributed to the 15-year-old Italian teenager whose birth in 1991 will make him the first “millennial” to become a saint.

Speaking ahead of the beatification of her son in 2020, the heartbreak that all parents experience over the loss of a child has been mingled with serenity and joy for Antonia Salzano, as she prepared to see her son beatified at the Basilica of St Francis.

“It’s unusual for parents to (be present at) the beatification of their son or daughter,” Ms Salzano said.

Antonia Salzano, the mother of Carlo Acutis, is pictured in front of his tomb after it was opened in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Assisi, Italy in 2020. Photo: CNS/courtesy Diocese of Assisi-Nocera Umbra-Gualdo Tadino.

“It’s very unusual because normally it takes a long time. But instead, for Carlo it took 14 years to have the beatification.”

As part of the sainthood process, Carlo Acutis’ body was exhumed and transferred to a place suitable for public veneration, the Shrine of the Renunciation at the Church of St Mary Major in Assisi.

Placed in a glass case, his body was dressed in jeans and a track suit jacket – the attire he was accustomed to wearing and what is seen in many of the photos taken of him during his life.

More details about the relics that will come to Perth will be published next week.

Carlo’s body, Ms Salzano told CNS, “was found intact. We cannot say incorrupt because the bishop doesn’t like it, because he says the only (ones who are) incorrupt are Jesus and the Virgin Mary.”

“Intact means that the body was like it was when he died. The only thing is that the skin became a little bit darker. For example, if you go to visit the body of St Rita in Cascia or St Catherine in Bologna,” a 15th-century Poor Clare whose body is believed to be miraculously incorrupt, “you see that the body is intact but the skin is darker,” Ms Salzano explained.

The body of Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006, is pictured at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Assisi, Italy on 3 October 2020. The Italian teen, who had a great love for the Eucharist, is soon to be canonised. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

She also said that his organs also were found intact, and his heart was removed and placed in a reliquary that will be displayed at the beatification Mass.

In his exhortation on young people, Christus Vivit (“Christ Lives”), Pope Francis said Carlo was a role model for young people today who are often tempted by the traps of “self-absorption, isolation and empty pleasure.”

While Carlo created digital content when YouTube and Facebook were in their infancy, his life and example remain relevant in today’s fast paced age of social networking, Ms Salzano said.

One of Acutis’ most famous quotes, cited by the pope in his exhortation, was, “We are all born original, but many die as photocopies.”

“I think that Carlo was a bit of a prophet of his time,” she said. “Because, of course, a saint is somebody who goes a little bit against the mainstream, the mentality of most people.”

Carlo also worried that often-obsessive reverence for movie and music stars were becoming “a sort of idolatry,” she said. “Carlo used to say, ‘You see queues in front of a football match or an actor or rock singer, but you don’t see a queue for the tabernacle where there is the real presence of God, God that lives among us.'”