Making Life a Masterpiece

In commemoration of St. Carlo Acutis’s feast day this past Monday – the first “millennial saint,” whom Pope Leo canonized last September – EWTN republished this article, which remembers Carlo’s last days in the hospital where he’d endured a brief battle with leukemia.

“His eyes remain engrained [in our memories],” two of his doctors said, “His gaze was full of attention … of courage, of love, of strong empathy.”

Carlo has become a beloved figure over the years for lots of reasons: his youth, the way he navigated our digital age, his love for the poor and the sacraments. Perhaps best known for having created a website housing all kinds of material on Eucharistic miracles, he’s cherished, too, for his particular love for the Blessed Sacrament.

In this, Carlo’s life may have an especially important lesson for us. His hospital chaplain said that after his death, “I decided to learn about his life. I discovered that he was in love with the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and I therefore began to better understand some of his words.”

Carlo loved the Real Presence, his chaplain said. But one could also say that Carlo simply loved the real: the reality of Jesus, the reality of his and others’ humanity, the reality of holiness. Even if he is our first “internet saint,” Carlo’s sanctity wasn’t fundamentally derived from his engagement with what was virtual. It came from his encounters with what he discovered to be real – the real love of Jesus, most of all.

Along the same line, what draws us, too, to admiring and wanting to be close to this saint is his ordinariness. Carlo wore sneakers. He went to school and spent time with friends there. He played video games once a week. And in all of that Carlo is proof of what God wants from those who follow him: faithfulness, not talent; love, not accomplishment.

“Saints do not come from a ‘parallel universe,’” Pope Francis once said. Sanctity, too, is real, and it happens in real, ordinary circumstances just like ours. So perhaps this week we can be reminded, as Pope Leo prompted at Carlo’s canonization, “not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards and make them masterpieces.” In the midst of whatever other news is happening in the world, that’s surely an effort worth pursuing.