Hajja Salesjana Apr-June 2019

H AJJA S ALESJANA 14 On Thursday, November 24, 2016, Cardinal Angelo Scola closed the diocesan phase in the canonization process for Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old Italian boy who died in 2006 of leukemia. He was a well-loved teenager who devoted himself to prayer and daily mass as well as computer programming, film editing, website creation, editing and layout of comics. According to the website for his canonization process, “Carlo was gifted at anything related to computers so that his friends, and the adults with computer engineering degrees, considered him a genius. Everyone was amazed by his ability to understand the computer secrets that are normally accessible only to those who have completed university.” Who says you can’t be a saint? One of his most significant computer ventures was cataloguing all the Eucharistic miracles of the world. He started the project when he was 11 years old and wrote at the time, “the more Eucharist we receive, the more we will become like Jesus, so that on this earth we will have a foretaste of Heaven.” He then asked his parents to start taking him to all the places of the Eucharistic miracles, and two and half years later the project was completed. Acutis researched over 136 Eucharistic miracles that occurred over the centuries in different countries around the world, and have been acknowledged by the Church and collected them into a virtual museum. Besides creating a website to house this virtual museum, he helped create panel presentations that have traveled around the world. “Computer geek” takes one more step towards sainthood Carlo Acutis, who died at 15 years old, cataloged all of the Eucharistic miracles in the world. “We have always been expected in heaven.” By Philip Kosloski (Aleteia website)