Carlo Acutis: Virtual to Virtue
A reflection on Catholic Education with Parliamentarians, Ottawa, February 4, 2021
Fr. Stefano Penna, Chaplain, Canadian Catholic School Trustees Association
I have been haunted by an image that has been haunting one of the MPs with whom I was speaking this week. He told of his young son going into talk to his mother and making the gesture to pull down a face mask … though he wasn’t wearing one. How, this MP wondered, is my son being shaped by this ritual of pulling down the face mask?
Rituals engage us, rituals make us, and rituals ground us.
The House of Commons just doesn’t work without the rituals of rolling eye’s, snoring backbenchers, let alone bringing in the mace.
It has been my wonderful experience to enter the rooms of persons in the last moments of their earthly journey. I have discovered that by a simple gesture – the Sign of the Cross – those rooms become different places: eternity breaks in. With the ritual words of the Our Father spoken the boundary between heaven and earth fades. [1]
That is what Catholic education is, that is what Catholic education does. It gives to children, teachers, and families the words that open up minds and hearts to mystery of who they are and the adventure of life. “I have come to know the love God has for us”– the ritual gestures that train bodies to know that they are more than Social Insurance Numbers – they are each of them precious and named and known – “You are my beloved child”.
God’s love in Christ is a God of reality, of flesh – not just of ideas and philosophies – but a God who became a person – in Jesus God becomes flesh – and that real story continues in the flesh of a community, the Church.
That is what is so bitterly hard for our schools in this pandemic distancing – we are people of real embodied love – how do you love on-line?
Reducing people to pixels just doesn’t cut it for those who know God’s teaches through real bodies. The screen lies by looking like flesh … but there is no touch, nor smell, and the sound is tinny If it works at all. The screen makes us a technological notion – an idea that can be manipulated. People become ideas – Is it any wonder that we are thinking of passing laws filled with trendy words like “non-cisgender gender”?
Children want to be more than categories – the key to education is relationship – the key to relationship is love. God is love. This is the essence of Catholic Education.
Children want to be really loved – not virtually disengaged.
Carlo Acutis teaches us this. This young Italian boy lived only a few years – dying at age 15 of an aggressive leukemia in 2006. Sad, indeed. Tragic? No. Tragedy is found with those who rack up the years without really living. Carlo was the complete package – brilliant, good looking, a great friend, athletic, creative, healthy. There was a special adventure that got ahold of him early, however. it didn’t come from his parents who – like most parents of millennials were “spiritual not religious”. It beckoned this child from inside churches – headstrong boy of four he went into every church on the passegiata (family walk) to sit with Someone. Eventually his parents followed him into sitting with that someone – Jesus – and sitting with His Community.
Carlo’s family was wealthy, his parents could send him to a Jesuit Catholic School – where he flourished at math and computers. The head of the class, he was liked not resented because … there was a something about the boy. Scary smart. He was writing computer code as a little kid. But the Someone pushed him beyond the limits of the code – the code didn’t tell Carlo to have a virtual life – Carlo told the code how to be Excellent – the best (the word for excellence is VIRTUE). Carlo knew how to control the virtual by being virtuous. He loved video games … but he knew when to stop. It was fun but it wasn’t real.
Carlo knew how to be real. Like every super-engaged millennial, he was in every blinking program parents could put teens in. But there were two anchors he never missed: going to Mass every day and being with the poor.
He saw the computer as being a way to open up people to the adventure that comes from seeing God become flesh. It was the Someone – Jesus – in the Church waiting to really feed people with the Eucharist – “For my flesh is Real Food and my Blood is real drink,” said Jesus. Real Food – this is what Carlo knew and he reached out around the Globe through the internet to point his fellow millennials beyond the distracting flash of pixels to the inviting flesh of Love.
Does this sound airy-fairy and romantic? Perhaps to us older tired folks – beaten up on and by Social media. But not to a millennial wrestling technology to serve love. For the Flesh of the Eucharist impelled Carlo to be the flesh of service and love in the lives of others.
This is Catholic Education. Not a sectarian closed-in place of indoctrination in ideas but a place of meeting Jesus Christ the flesh of God making a community of brothers and sisters going out to feed the world.
Check it out. In every Catholic school district our students have learned the ritual of service – while COVID distances we reach out in care and support. Our schools and kids organize food drives, messaging to shut ins. Our schools are not virtual-signaling vacuums insisting on individual rights – but virtuous centers training young people to care for the needs of others.
Carlo has captured the imagination of our Catholic Young people – young people came from all over the world to visit the body of one “who is just like us”. For Carlo’s imagination was caught by meeting the God who pulls down the mask we put on Him – and shows us the face of Christ. And because of Carlo the world is a better place.
That is the mission of Catholic Schools. To invite our students to be saints as was Carlo Acutis. To awaken the “Carlo Acutis imagination” in our children. And with that vision our students will be able to really see the flesh of every person as the mask is pulled down and what is seen is the face of Christ. And Canada will become a better place.
“La vita è un dono perché finché siamo su questo pianeta possiamo aumentare il nostro livello di carità. Tanto più sarà elevato tanto più godremo della Beatitudine Eterna di Dio”.
“Life is a gift because as long as we are on this planet we can increase our level of charity. The higher it is, the more we will enjoy the Eternal Blessedness of God.”
Carlo Acutis, pray for us.
[1] (I fear to think what portal is opened in the ritual of a doctor approaching a person with death kit for euthanasia.)