Given for the Eucharistic Festival at Westminster Cathedral on 11 October 2025. Bishop Nicholas processed in with a relic of St Carlo Acutis; and offered a reflection on the newly canonised saint, most particularly his devotion to the Most Holy Eucharist, before blessing the assembly with the relic.
“Are my eyes still bright, Mum?”
That was a question the young Carlo would ask his mother from time to time.
“Are my eyes still bright?”
Because he believed you could see the goodness in good people’s eyes; and he wanted to be sure he was still on the right track.
He had emblazoned across his diary the words, “We have seen his glory!”.
He was such a busy teenager that he kept an agenda on his computer – with the engagements on the left-hand side; and, on the right, against every engagement, the words, “We have seen his glory!” – the words of the Beloved Disciple.
Carlo saw the glory of Christ in everyone around him but especially in the most needy.
Famous now is his care for poor: the Caritas store he kept in the garage at home – of sleeping-bags, hats and gloves for those on the streets; the way he’d leave a sandwich and a five-Euro note by their bedding.
Accounts of his kindness to those in school are equally touching – how he showed special kindness to the boy in his class with learning disabilities who became rather clingy; but when the teacher said, “You don’t need to spend so much time with Andrea,” Carlo replied, “He’s a friend and I want to help him.”
They say Carlo was very funny in class – funny but never cruel.
He had a reputation for looking out for anyone who was being bullied; or for a class-mate who might be suffering because their parents were divorcing: he’d ask his mother if he couldn’t have the boy or girl round to cheer them up.
The same kindness won him many friends in the locality.
All the caretakers of the different residences around the town knew him as the boy with the smile.
Old ladies weren’t surprised to find Carlo whisk their shopping off them and beat them home!
In the supermarket he’d surprise someone who hadn’t quite enough money by paying the difference.
His school-friends knew he loved to go and be with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.
“The boy who was in love with the Eucharist,” Pope Francis called him.
From a very young age Carlo was urging his parents to let him go and talk to Jesus in church.
Rajesh, who helped his parents manage the house, wasn’t a Christian but used to go with Carlo into church on the way back from school.
Rajesh says Carlo spoke about God as if he were so beautiful that he eventually asked to become a Christian himself.
For Carlo the Eucharist was at the centre of his life.
“The more we receive the Eucharist,” he would say, “the more we become like Jesus and receive a foretaste of heaven.”
He was convinced we each have the potential to be saints; and the way to become saints is to bask in the presence of Jesus.
“If we face the sun,” he would say, “we get a tan. But if we look at Jesus we become saints.”
It’s not a coincidence that the way his body lies in Assisi is with his head tilted towards the tabernacle.
It’s the very tabernacle before which he used to pray as a teenager – in the church nearest to his parents’ house.
The five old people who prayed there remember him and say they used to tell him, “Carlo, why don’t you go down to the Basilica where you’ll find lots of other young people?”
They recall his reply: “All I need is Jesus; and he’s here.”
His father once suggested they visit the Holy Land; but Carlo told him, “Dad, we don’t need to; because Jesus is here. In fact, he’s closer to us now than he was to those first disciples who saw him in the Holy Land but couldn’t reach him.”
Heartfelt was his bemoaning of the fact that people queue for hours to see a rock concert but that you find no one queuing to be with Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament.
“If people realised the miracle of Jesus’s presence in the tabernacle, the churches would be full,” he’d say.
It was this that inspired him to make a website of Eucharistic miracles – to help people believe.
The week of his Beatification, Google reported a spike in searches for eucharistic miracles!
Shortly after he made his First Holy Communion, Carlo told his parents: “To be close to Jesus: this is my life-plan.”
Central to that plan, central to becoming a saint, he was convinced, was the need to spend time daily before the Blessed Sacrament – but not only that: also to seek frequent Confession, even for venial sins; to seek a spiritual guide; seek a daily encounter with Our Lady through prayer of the Most Holy Rosary; and to welcome Christ in the poor.
Such wisdom in a fifteen-year-old!
I find deeply touching the account his mother Antonia gives of how the family were once in Portofino enjoying a smart dinner in a restaurant, when Carlo left the table in distress.
Antonia followed him out and he told her, “I felt Jesus telling me in my heart, ‘I thirst’; and I knew he was thirsting for all the well-off people round about us.”
Carlo thirsted for Jesus; and knew Jesus to thirst for him.
I find in Carlo many echoes of the young Therese of Lisieux.
Carlo told the only girl he ever kissed, “Jesus is the one I love.”
Therese had inscribed on the wall of her cell just five words: “Jesu est mon seul amour; Jesus is the one I love.”
Like Therese, Carlo looked to the Gospels for inspiration in prayer, taking just one word and ruminating it in his soul.
“I find within me some word he sends me,” said Carlo, “some passage from the Gospel that cloaks me in security and confidence.”
These two young saints: they teach us how to live; they teach us how to pray; they teach us how to die.
Death announced itself to both mother and son when Antonia looked one morning into her son’s bright eyes; and saw a strange red dot – the first sign of the leukaemia which would shortly ravage his body.
Carlo had had a premonition too.
He left, pasted to the desktop of his computer, a video of himself speaking to camera, saying, “I’ve ballooned to 70kg; I know I shall die young.”
He’d already told his parents, “We’re all destined to go to Golgotha.”
He embraced death with consummate courage and strength.
Just a few days before he died, as his mother slept beside his hospital bed, she had a dream – which would serve later to console her.
She dreamt she was in a church with St Francis praying alongside her.
Suddenly there appeared in the vault a huge image of Carlo; and St Francis told her, “Carlo will be important in the Church.”
Little did she know just how important – though she got an inkling of it just the following week when they gathered in the parish church for Carlo’s funeral; and the place was jam-packed – not only with Carlo’s family and school-friends but countless poor people and immigrants from the locality, all of whom attested to what a friend Carlo had been to them.
And Carlo remained a friend to so many, even in death.
When his parents returned from the hospital to tell his grandmother that he’d died, she told them, “I know: he’s already appeared to me to say, ‘Granny, don’t be sad because I’m in heaven now with the angels – and I’m going to look after you’.”
He seems to befriend a great many people who look to him for intercession – like, recently, the family whose grandmother lay dying in hospital.
Her grandson brought together a group of friends to pray daily for Carlo’s intercession.
One day, the old lady told her grandson that, every evening, a young male nurse dressed in red would come to pray with her.
Even when she moved to a hospital on the other side of town, the young man still came to her.
“Ask him who he is,” the grandson urged her.
At first she didn’t want to; but eventually she did; and, with a beautiful smile, the young man told her, “Your grandson knows who I am. Ask him!”
She recovered; and lived to tell the tale!
Now that Carlo has been canonised, he’s given to all of us – to call on his help and intercession whenever we’re in need; and especially when we need help to pray.
As Pope Leo reminded us at his Canonisation, “Carlo loved to say that heaven has always been waiting for us and that to love tomorrow is to give the best of our fruit today.”
As we continue our prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, let’s ask Carlo’s prayers that he help us indeed “to give the best of our fruit today” so that, in God’s good time, we might be able to join Carlo and all the saints in heaven for eternity – unworthy though we know ourselves to be.
