The way the Catholic Church is milking the death of 15-year-old Carlo Acutis to promote superstition is embarrassing. It’s a further embarrassment that so many bona fide media outlets have unquestioningly repeated the Church’s claims.
That the Italian teenager died of acute myeloid leukemia in 2006 was tragic, as are all cancer deaths, particularly of children and young people. But instead of pouring some of its enormous wealth into cancer research — which would be very welcome given the Trump administration’s devastating new war on the war on cancer — the Catholic Church instead has exploited the death to promote its doctrines.
As few people following the news could have missed, the Church made Carlo a saint on Sept 7. To be pronounced a saint, this hoary religion that ushered in the Dark Ages requires at least two “miracles” to be attributed to the deceased individual, as approved by the pope. A step to sainthood requires “beatification,” which in Carlo’s case occurred in 2020. The second “miracle” must be recognized as happening after the beatification. The Guardian duly reports, “In Catholicism, people can pray to deceased people who they believe to be in heaven to request they speak to God on their behalf, such as asking for a person to recover from an illness or injury.”
This strikes my heathen mind as blasphemous. Pray to dead people as proxies for God? But isn’t all prayer in a sense blasphemous? Ambrose Bierce nailed the hubris, irrationality and hypocrisy involved in prayer when he defined it: “Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.”
In any case, Pope Francis “approved” as a miracle that a 7-year-old boy in Brazil recovered from a pancreatic disorder after coming into contact with one of Carlo’s T-shirts. (Yes, one is left to wonder how on earth one of the dead Carlo’s T-shirts found its way into that Brazilian hospital room.) Also, we are told (as if even the Church recognized that the first “proof” sounded sketchy), a priest had prayed to Carlo on behalf of the child. (I told you this was embarrassing.)
But wait, there’s more! The Medical Council of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes, which exists to look into the validity of “miracles,” claimed that a Costa Rican woman had a “miraculous” recovery after a bicycle accident in Florence in 2022. After physicians gave her an emergency craniotomy to reduce pressure on the brain, her mother supposedly prayed for her daughter’s recovery at the “tomb of Acutis” in the town of Assisi six days later. On that very day, so they say, the daughter began breathing without a ventilator, and upon discharge, we are told, the contusion on her brain had “disappeared.” Let’s review this information: Physicians performed the craniotomy, hospital ICU watched over her as she healed with 21st-century medical care, but it was a mother’s belated prayer that cured her?
Carlo’s body was exhumed and transferred in 2019 to a shrine at the Church of St. Mary Major, said to be the very spot where Saint Francis renounced his wealth. Carlo’s corpse is on display there in a glass case, wearing blue jeans, a zip-up and Nike sneakers, according to NPR. (I told you this was embarrassing, but I forgot to warn you that it’s macabre, too.)
And it gets more macabre. A silicon mask was constructed to hide the corpse’s decay. His displayed hands are covered in wax to preserve them. (You can see photographs here; I’m not making this up.) Carlo’s heart was (yuck) cut out and is preserved in a golden reliquary at a nearby cathedral. The Church took cuttings of his hair, bones and parts of his organs to save as relics for veneration. These were distributed to various churches and shrines. The relics are ranked: A “first-class” relic is part of the saint’s body. A “second-class” relic is something Carlo owned, and a “third-class” relic is something he allegedly had touched. The Daily Mail reports that after the Sept. 7 canonization, the market for online shopping of pieces associated with Carlo and his alleged property has gone wild.
This teenager, who was born in London in 1991, and moved to Milan with his parents as a child, has been widely described by them as a “computer prodigy” who would donate his pocket money to help the homeless and befriend classmates who were being bullied or going through tough times. Now the Church refers to Carlo as “God’s influencer” and “patron saint of the internet” because he cataloged Eucharistic miracles. Carlo’s concern for other people is laudable, but his mother’s aggressive campaign for the sainthood of her son is, yes, embarrassing.
As philosopher David Hume noted (in a pre-feminist era) in his section on miracles in his essay, “First Inquirer”: “A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. … A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.”
Carl Sagan made the point more concisely and memorably in his book, “Broca’s Brain”: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Or, we could turn back to Ambrose Bierce and “The Devil’s Dictionary” for his definition of a miracle: “Miracle. -n. An act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable, as beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four aces and a king.”
It will truly be a secular miracle when humankind, to quote one good piece of advice from the bible, finally chooses to “put away childish things” — such as superstitious beliefs in miracles.
