Though St. Carlo Acutis lived an ordinary teenage life, his extraordinary charity and devotion to Christ continue to inspire young Catholics around the world, according to a bishop in southwestern England, the country where the saint was born.
The remarks of Bishop Nicholas Hudson, of the Diocese of Plymouth, explain “why St Carlo Acutis is the saint for our times,” according to a May 27 article published by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.
“He does appeal to all generations, but he is a saint for teenagers. They look at him and say, this Carlo – he was one of us, wasn’t he? He was just like us,” Bishop Hudson said in an interview posted May 22 by the international ecumenical prayer initiative Thy Kingdom Come.
Acutis was born in England in 1991 and moved with his family to Milan, Italy, when he was quite young. As the bishop recalled, Acutis became known for his kindness and generosity to people of all ages.
The boy, “a real friend of the poor,” Bishop Hudson said, would often return home from school asking his mother for material goods they might be able to give away to a poor person he saw in need. He could also sometimes be seen at the supermarket sharing a few of his euros with someone who did not have enough.
The bishop also described Acutis as “the life and soul of the school” he attended in Milan. He enjoyed telling jokes, but not at the expense of others.
“They say he was very funny in class – very funny, but never cruel,” Bishop Hudson said. “He’d stick up for any of the children with learning disabilities or other disabilities. He’d stick up for anybody who was being bullied.”
Growing up in the dawn of internet technology, Acutis became a talented computer programmer. He put this skill to the service of his devotion to the Eucharist, designing a website cataloguing Eucharistic miracles around the world, Bishop Hudson recalled.
Acutis would stop into his local church whenever he could to pray before the tabernacle, Bishop Hudson said, adding that Acutis said he would go “talk to Jesus about the things that were really important in his life.”
The bishop also recalled how Acutis also famously described the Eucharist as “our highway to Heaven.”
“The more we receive the Eucharist, the more we become like Jesus,” the young Catholic saint added.
At age 15, Acutis was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. Bishop Hudson related how the teenager faced the diagnosis with selflessness, saying that he would offer up the suffering for Christ and the Church. The bishop also recalled that the day before Acutis’ death, he was asked where he was in pain; the teenager replied, “There are a lot of people in this world suffering a lot more pain than me.”
Acutis died in 2006 at age 15. The local parish that held the funeral was packed, Bishop Hudson said, not only with family and friends from school, but also with many of the poor people Acutis had helped over the years.