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To tell the story of the soon-to-be-blessed boy, Carlo Acutis, Simone Weil’s words are perhaps perfect, introducing the layman to the understanding of a tragically brief and at the same time exemplary existential parable, marked by a religious vocation. “La plénitude della croix” – the fullness of the cross – Simon writes to induce the understanding of the absolute iconic Christian, even Christological, in a kind of mystical enchantment. A journey that, in the case of Simone, born Jewish, then a militia among the anarchists of the “Colonna Durruti” in Spain in 1936, finally sees her conversion to Christianity: the fullness that restores light to the so-called spiritual path, a vocation, an Enlightenment, Juan de la Cruz and Rimbaud would say elsewhere.
The image of the child Carlo Acutis, in the next few hours destined for the “honors of the altars”, on the way to canonization, lying in his reliquary in the church of Assisi, beyond any possible reflection on grace, contains something equally extraordinary . already in your immediate visual data. Carlo died at the age of fifteen of fulminant leukemia, it shows a tragic, unfair and at the same time exemplary story: the story of his vocation. Now here he is composed on his bed of holiness, intact in his dreams and in his time: the blue sports suit, the boy’s garment, the hiking garment, the “Nike” on his feet, the stillness in his face reconstructed with a silicone mask, curls. The visual history of secularization, with him, in him, in that youthful “carefree”, suddenly seems to break into the sacred representation, to the point of becoming a sign of the incarnation of the Christian message in the contemporary world. In its additional iconography, the image of Charles makes everyday life visually triumph. Where the “Nikes” on the feet take the place of Francesco’s sandals once.
Carlo Acutis, I read, will perhaps be the first blessed 2.0, a kind of guardian angel of the network, protecting the telematic paths, from the immobility of his reliquary. Just as Saint Cristoforo is shown in the magnets that dwell on the dashboards of cars, patron of motorists, and even of pilgrims, drivers, boatmen, travelers, pilots, truckers, railwaymen, in the same way Carlo will remain for many, ideally , to protect the mail. , transfigured into the host that Saint Tarcisio has with him when he was martyred during the persecution of Christians in Aurelian’s time. Ideally, Carlo would still imagine himself with Rita da Cascia, saint of impossible miracles, her Yves Klein, the most mystical artist of the last century, the inventor of blue, wanted to deliver his own ex-Voto made up of pure pigments and ingots of ‘gold.
Like Pier Giorgio Frassati, Carlo Acutis is a child of the upper middle class of the wealthy north, in his words the Eucharist is transfigured into “A way to heaven”. Among his passions, I keep reading, “computing, for which he showed great talent, and which used to bear witness to the faith through the creation of websites”. Carlo died in 2006, on October 12, as a teenager. In April 2019, in the lower basilica of San Francisco, his remains, after being exhumed and preserved in the embalming process, were transferred to the Sanctuary of the Dispossession of Assisi, there is his white funeral monument, similar to a candle. placed in the right aisle.
Watching him lying there gives the feeling that the seal of the Christian story of death in its most cruel and penitential form has finally been broken. Not the austerity of a San Carlo da Sezze, immobile in his habit, in the Roman church of San Francesco a Ripa, a few steps from the Giorgio De Chirico chapel. Not even the ceremonial serenity of Pope John with the violet robes, slippers, red surplice with white trim, gloves to hide the now petrified hands; John XXIII, exposed to the devotion and gaze of the faithful in St. Peter’s Basilica, finally a saint.
Looking at the remains of Charles there in the reliquary, the changes in customs that have affected the entire Catholic Church come to mind, the memory of the first “beaten masses” in Rome in April 1966, a time when that it still seemed that the guitars, the long hair, the boots of Ringo, George, John and Paul were alien, if not blasphemous, compared to Christian worship, the Agnus Dei, communion, attire enemies of true religious services. In the perception of what we will call Carlo Acutis’s devotional “gaze,” of what remains of the child’s body, he experiences the discontinuity with respect to the ghostly and mortuary iconographic history of traditional Christian deposition elsewhere.
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