When the images of Carlo Acutis's body were beamed across the world last week, there were a number of divergent reactions. For Protestant prolifers in the United States, it inspired feelings of revulsion, many of them failing to comprehend the enormity of the implications that resulted from asserting the holiness of the human body itself. For others, Catholic and non Catholic, there was the common astonishment that we were being presented with a boy about to be beatified in a tracksuit after earning his life of holiness through the internet.
Acutis died only aged 15 in 2006 from leukemia. The holiness of his life was such that it consisted of the old reliables, he attended Confession each week, he read the lives of the saints and he was devoted to the Rosary. Most importantly, when his illness deteriorated rapidly, he offered it up for Pope Benedict XVI and stated ‘there are those who suffer much more than me’ when asked about his pain.
Strikingly however, he also expressed his love for God online and catalogued Eucharistic miracles on a website that he built himself. For young people today, and some adults, the internet has become an impediment to their religious life, enticing them into sins unimaginable without its corrosive influence. Yet for others, the internet has led them to the Traditional Latin Mass, to videos of men like Fulton Sheen, to the great works it Augustine and Aquinas. The internet is a very powerful tool, we can hope and pray that with the intercession of Blessed Carlo Acutis that people learn to harness its power to spread the glory of our faith.