Blessed Carlo Acutis and the Many Miracles of the Eucharist
The temptation to normalize sanctity comes from a good place. Relatable saints can be imitated. We have a desire to open whatever is the Catholic equivalent of US Weekly’s “Stars—They’re Just Like Us” and see St. Francis of Assisi watering his garden (while suffering from the stigmata). St. Ignatius of Loyola is just your average bro who wanted people to find God in all things (who happened to break out in tears every time that he celebrated Mass). St. Catherine of Siena is a fine example of a female leader who exerted power against corruption (and who also survived for years while consuming the Eucharist alone).
The closer the saint is to our day, the more we might wipe out the weirdness of sanctity. Blessed, soon to be Saint, Carlo Acutis is especially prone to this kind of treatment. When his canonization was announced, newspapers declared: the first Millennial saint. Statues of Carlo depict him wearing tennis shoes. He has a video recorder or a computer in his arms. He is dressed as Italian teenagers from the early aughts might have dressed. He was a web designer; he had a video game system just like I did (do). Who is more relatable than Blessed Carlo? #MillennialSaints.
Carlo Acutis died in 2006 from leukemia. He was fifteen. As it turns out, like the other saints of the Catholic Church, his “normalcy” is relative. Carlo asked to receive his First Communion at the age of six. From then on, he was a daily communicant. My son who is eleven and my daughter who will receive her First Communion attend Mass reluctantly on a weekly basis. Sometimes, I attend Mass reluctantly. Carlo lived an ascetic life. Yes, he had a video game system, but he played this system for an hour per week. As a forty-two-year-old man, I continue to play video games for a longer time per week than Carlo did when he was fifteen. If Carlo was given anything (a bike, clothing, or a new pair of shoes), he gave it away to the poor. His family was well-off, but anything he received, he sought to pass on to the homeless in Milan. His funeral Mass was full of people who were recipients of Carlo’s hidden acts of charity.
Yes, before he died, Carlo made websites. But not for the kind of things that young people make websites for today. He was not anticipating the arrival of cryptocurrency, ride sharing apps, or even influencer-based Catholic evangelization. He focused on those dimensions of Catholicism that are uncomfortable to many of us modern Westerners. Marian apparitions. Eucharistic miracles. The kind of interruptions of the supernatural into the mundane that many theology departments do their best to avoid speaking about except as religious phenomena that expose the zeitgeist of an era. He thought the internet could be a different kind of place, one that led people to visit Eucharistic and Marian shrines. But he was mostly wary of the internet, especially the free license it gave to pornography. When he died, his mother Antonia Salzano found herself reading the various diaries that Carlo kept on his computer. What she discovered was not a teenager developing a small business plan with a potential move to Silicon Valley. Instead, it was a diary full of theological insights, especially around the Eucharist, from a young man who was only fifteen years of age. During the terrible suffering he endured in the eleven days between his diagnosis and death, he did not complain. He offered his sufferings for Pope Benedict XVI and the entire Catholic Church. And through his life and death, he has transformed the existence of his mother, Antonia, who went from being an apathetic Catholic to a devout Catholic woman who studied for a master’s degree in theology.
Now, dear reader, think back and remember what you were doing when you were fifteen. Lest you feel uncomfortable admitting it, at the age of fifteen, I was not begging to attend daily Mass. I was not thinking about Eucharistic miracles or Marian apparitions (though, there were some young women named Mary who occupied much of my attention). I was playing video games (mostly Mortal Kombat), listening to Weezer and Presidents of the United States of America, and I was certainly not setting up websites related to Eucharistic miracles (in fairness, I did not have the internet until I was eighteen). But when I did get the internet in 2000, I sent endless AIM messages to friends about nothing. I certainly could not imagine offering up my terminal diagnosis for the Pope.
Carlo was weird. The clue to unlocking his holiness, might I suggest, is related to the websites he set up. Marian apparitions. Eucharistic miracles. He believed and then lived out the consequences of the Incarnation: the Word was made flesh, dwelt among us, lived among us, died for us, rose for us, and still is here for us. He is present on every altar, in every hungry and thirsty person who directs their gaze to us asking for a cup of cold water. And if you want to pursue holiness, then it is through that materiality: from the Eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ to the flesh and blood life we possess here and now. The body matters because Christ’s Body matters.
Eucharistic Miracles
But first, we must start with Carlo’s devotion to Eucharistic miracles. Miracles related to the Eucharist are manifold. The first and primary Eucharistic miracle is the Eucharist itself. At every Mass, bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. Through the words that Christ spoke at the Last Supper, through the power of the Spirit, bread and wine become the true presence of the Lord. In the early Church, the focus of Eucharistic transformation was on the miracle of a food that leads us into immortality, inviting us to share in divine life. You may see bread and wine, Cyril of Jerusalem says, but your senses fail you. When you receive the Eucharist, he notes in his fifth mystagogical sermon, do not come and grasp the elements—approach them with reverence. Instead, make of your hands a throne to receive Christ’s Body. Having received Christ, sanctify your lips. Then receive the wine, which is Christ’s blood. Sanctify each of your senses through the gift of Christ’s blood.
This patristic approach to the Eucharist eventually proves insufficient. The story is a long one involving the introduction of philosophical schema distinct from the modified Platonism of early Christianity, eventual heresies that put in doubt the “true” presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and a new relationship to the Eucharist arising from what we would call today, popular piety. The Eucharist is no longer miraculous food alone, the Bridegroom coming to nourish the Bride. The Eucharist is the personal presence of the Lord. Even when one does not receive the Eucharist, your eyes are sanctified through the sense of sight in ocular communion—your eyes touch the Host. If the Eucharist is processed through town, taken to the sick, then everyone kneels before this presence.
There are also the earliest accounts of Eucharistic miracles. The paradigmatic one is that of the Mass of St. Gregory the Great. Already in the eight and ninth centuries, the pattern for at least one of these types of Eucharistic miracles is established. Mass is being celebrated, yet someone doubts that the Eucharist is truly the presence of Christ. Sometimes, in the case of this saintly legend, it is the woman who baked the bread for Mass. In other legends, it is a deacon. St. Gregory the Great asks for a sign, and the Eucharist becomes a bleeding finger or, in later versions of the legend, the Man of Sorrows. The purpose of the miracle is to lead to a conversion in belief on the part of the one who doubts.
Before moving to other miracle stories, it is important to attend to a bit of Eucharistic theology, arising from the high medieval period. As I have already said, the Eucharist is a miracle. But the question is how. Miracles tend to be understood as some sign of wonder connected to divine power. They tend to lead to the control of nature through an extraordinary act of divine power: saints who fly, saints who bleed, saints whose very body heals from what were thought to be life-ending diseases. Such miracles are apparent exceptions to how the material world normally functions (though, if we are wise, we might recognize that we are not always quite sure how the material world functions itself). People do not normally fly, we do not normally bleed from our hands and side (without dying), and my body has never healed anyone. Yet.
The transformation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is not that kind of miracle. For what the Church eventually calls transubstantiation is not a natural change but a supernatural one. In 1215, before St. Thomas Aquinas was born, the Fourth Lateran Council noted that the transformation of the Eucharistic elements might be described as transubstantiation. But the Council, like almost all Church Councils, did not address every theological nicety of this transformation. It was up to St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, to attend to the miraculous quality of transubstantiation. The transformation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ at the level of substance was beyond the miraculous. It was the act of Christ, whose words at the Last Supper were authoritative. The invisible substance, what makes bread and wine what they are, is transformed at the words of Christ spoken by the priest in the very person of Christ. We are not talking about a physical change, but as Thomas invites us to sing in the Adoro te devote (translation by Gerard Manley Hopkins):
Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived:
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth Himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.
Still, there remains that pesky problem: for “something” whose substance is changed, the Body and Blood of Christ continue to act a lot like bread and wine. The Host is broken. The Blood of Christ in the chalice is poured, and the Blood still intoxicates. Here, at last, we have what might be properly called the miracle of the Eucharist. The Eucharistic substance is transformed without the accidents or species changing. St. Thomas here is showing how unlike Aristotle he is. For Aristotle, substances do not change without accidents changing. You would lock me up if I said to you, “Hey, listen. You see before you a human being, one named Tim. But guess what, I’m not Tim. I’m not human. I’m a bear. Sure, your senses say to you that’s Tim, the human being. But your senses are wrong. I am a bear of roughly seven years of age.”
The Eucharistic miracle is the personal presence of Christ, his Body and Blood for the life of the world, shared with us under the material signs of bread and wine. But it is no magic trick or deception of the senses. Christ gives himself to us in a way that we can receive him: as food and drink. The species or accidents remain; they are sustained without a substance, so that Christ may be for us the manna from heaven, food for the journey, making us co-participants in the ecclesial banquet that anticipates heaven itself. Christ does not depart heaven to do this, as Thomas clarifies, but this piece of matter is taken up entirely into God without losing what makes it act and behave like matter. Transubstantiation, as it turns out, anticipates what creation itself will become when Christ will be all in all.
So then, what about other Eucharistic miracles? When the Host begins to bleed? When Jesus appears on the altar, and everyone seems him? Are not these miracles just lifting the veil for us, helping us see what is really happening in transubstantiation? For Thomas, no. Although relatively silent on Eucharistic miracles, devoting one article of a single question (ST III, q. 76, a. 8) to them, he speaks about these Eucharistic miracles as a secondary one. The miracle of transubstantiation, the sustaining of accidents without a substance, means that it is possible for the Eucharist to have yet another miraculous transformation. The accidents can become blood. The accidents might become the appearance of Christ. But once the accidents are no longer bread or wine, then we are no longer speaking the Eucharist. We now possess a relic of a Eucharistic miracle.
The question then becomes: if the Eucharist is already the personal presence of the Lord of heaven and earth, why do we need Eucharistic miracles? Is that not enough? Well, first off, yes: the Eucharistic worship of the Church is enough. In a catalogue entitled The Eucharistic Miracles of the World, an exhibition that was the idea of Carlo Acutis himself, the introduction underlines that faith in Eucharistic presence is not founded on such miracles. As the introductory catechesis underlines: “We must never forget nor fail to mention that the Eucharist is the true, great, inexhaustible daily miracle” (xvi). If the human family appreciated this fact, then Eucharistic miracles would be of little interest to us since we would have learned to see the glorious presence of the Lord given in sacramental form. A bleeding host compares little to the gift bestowed on your parish altar every day of the week.
But the reality, as Carlo knew, is that we do not appreciate this fact. And the Eucharistic Lord wants human beings to recognize the gift of this presence, the wondrous fact that the Word became flesh, dwelt among us, and still is present to us under these sacramental signs. Carlo’s own Eucharistic thought, his mystical appreciation of the Eucharistic mystery, is the key to understanding the gift of these miracles for our own age.
In a book written by his mother, My Son Carlo: Carlo Acutis Through the Eyes of His Mother, Antonia Salzano Acutis shares large portions of various theological notes he wrote on his computer. The longest sections she shares are on the Eucharist, the sacrament that Carlo called the Highway to Heaven. From Carlo himself:
And so the Eucharist, which is a “second Incarnation,” truly becomes not so much a Sacrament in the ritual sense but rather a Sacrament in the supernatural sense. For this reason, when we take Communion, Jesus pauses among us for fifteen minutes, hidden in the form of bread and wine, substantially present, truly residing. . . . He shares this day with us and continues, after the forms of bread and wine have decomposed, with his grace, his residence with us. So, we become his house, his home, and so Jesus, present, alive, and real, is not only a fact of faith, not only a fact of “sacramentality,” but a fact of “Life!” . . . Jesus is with me and I with him, as an extremely personal, individual fact. This direct contact between Jesus and I occurs through the Eucharist and the Faith. When Jesus came to this planet earth, he tried to summarize, or as Paul says, to recapitulate all eternity, all of humanity in himself. Humanity before him, humanity in him, humanity after him. This is residing. And Jesus, residing in this sense, recapitulated in himself, day by day, hour by hour, the entire human race, in every sense. . . . And so we have before us a miracle which leaves us in awe and which leaves us truly surprised. It is the miracle of redemption, it is the miracle of Jesus’s life with us, who in recapitulating all of humanity in himself, made himself truly, really Redeemer, Savior, and Sanctifier of each and every one of us (218).
The miracle of the Eucharist is, for Carlo, the wondrous mystery of redemption where God resides in us. The heart of secularization, for Carlo, is both the Church’s and society’s forgetfulness that in the Eucharistic mystery, Love itself comes to pitch its tent among us. We are not talking about a nice ritual, a pleasant series of aesthetic rites that make us feel God’s presence. God is here because the God-man dwells on that altar, in tabernacles, and in the human heart. Our lives cannot be understood, as human beings, apart from the materiality of God’s self-emptying love in Christ given in the Eucharist.
The materiality of the gift was why Carlo was so interested in both Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions. These miraculous interventions in human history are the extension of the fact of redemption here and now. You want to turn Christianity into a series of moral principles? Intellectual proposals separate from the person of Christ? Fanciful tales that were true once upon a time but are good only for maintaining a sense of culture? You cannot make these moves! You find yourself tripping over the materiality of it all, the very fact that God became man to save each of us. And on that altar, the beauty of Christ’s redemption gift is still given to us. If only we possess the eyes to see.
We can now return to attend to some of these Eucharistic miracles themselves, many of which Carlo featured on his website. Although existing under various types, each miracle is ultimately concerned with the communion of human beings with God, which is the reality that sustains us. God is here, protecting us from harm. The Father redeems through the gift of the Son and the pouring out of the Spirit.
There is a variety of Eucharistic miracles involving bleeding Hosts. These medieval miracles each take up a specific form: someone doubts that Christ is present under the Eucharistic species (a lay person or a priest) or they steal the Eucharist to use it for another end than it was intended for (as a kind of magical talisman). At some point, the Eucharistic Host begins to bleed, leading the person toward deeper Eucharistic faith or a confession of their transgression. It can even happen that such miracles occur for persons of devout faith. In Augsburg in 1194, a pious woman took the Eucharist home with her because there were not yet tabernacles in churches. She wanted to reserve the Eucharist in the cupboard of her home so that she might express her devotion to the Lord (this practice was, in fact, common in early Christianity—the Eucharist might be taken home to feed upon in between liturgies). Five years later, she was wracked with remorse and brought the Host back to the priest. Rather than discover a moldy Host, the priest opened the wax container holding Christ, and the Host was bleeding. At once, the priest told his bishop, and then the town gathered in procession to the cathedral to adore the Eucharistic relic. The host continued to grow from Easter until the feast of St. John the Baptist at which point a feast was established in honor of the relic. Further Eucharistic miracles occurred.
Now, you could read this miracle as a chiding of a pious woman for transgressing against Eucharistic norms. But you do not have to. Her faith led her to want to be close to the Lord, and rather than discovering that she had let the presence of Christ mold, the Host bled. Blood, in the medieval imagination, is the privileged way of expressing the love that Christ has—it is the life fully poured out. A bleeding Host is a sign that invites us to see what the Eucharist really is: Christ loves us. And in the end, the woman got what she wanted. The Eucharistic relic of Christ’s love was now available for her worship.
You see this kind of divine kindness often in these miracles. In Bettbrunn, Germany, the owner of a farm lived far away from a church: an hour and a half. He loved the Blessed Sacrament, and for this reason, he stole a Host. He transformed his walking stick into a monstrance, creating an opening on top where he placed the Eucharistic Lord. He would position his stick into the ground while tending his flock, then kneel before the presence of Christ. But once he forgot that his stick had a new, sanctified use, and he threw it at his quickly dispersing flock. At once, he recognized what he had done, ran to the Host, and tried to pick the Blessed Sacrament up. The Host could not be moved. No one could move the Host including the parish priest or bishop until that bishop promised to build a chapel on the very site where the Blessed Sacrament had been thrown to the ground. The miracle is not in the least a punishment for the man’s transgression but an act of mercy: you cannot make it to Mass, but you want to? Guess what, here is a chapel for you. Sincerely, your Eucharistic Lord.
Even in those moments where there is judgment, it is always suffused with the mercy of Christ’s love. A priest is called to visit a sick man, but he is sloppy about the whole thing. He places a Host haphazardly in between the pages of his Breviary to go give this man communion. Rather than recognize the significance of his priestly responsibilities, his role in giving communion to this sick man, he treats the whole thing as an inconvenient job: get there, get back, and move on. But when he opens the Breviary to give the Host, the pages are stuck. The Host is bleeding. Yes, he has committed sacrilege against the Eucharist but also against his flock. He at once expressed penitence, and his confessor told him that he is to keep these pages. It is not said, but these pages are to serve as a sign for the rest of his days of what it means to be a priest. You treated your sacramental ministry like a mere duty, but remember, what you bestow to men and women is the merciful love of the God-man.
No matter the Eucharistic miracle, what you find in the exhibition assembled by Carlo, you see the outpouring of divine mercy and redemption. While most of the Eucharistic miracles are medieval in origin, the exhibit contains several that are contemporary. In both Argentina and Poland, there have been Eucharistic miracles in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries where Eucharistic Hosts have bled. Unlike the medieval miracles, these modern ones have been investigated by medical officials. In both cases, the blood has been recognized as human. In such cases, the blood cells seem to be from a heart that has suffered trauma. The miracle cannot be explained: Hosts have bled, and the relics of these bleeding Hosts now attract the devotion of the faithful.
The presence of medical investigations around these miracles is both gift and curse. It is gift because whatever has happened to this Host, we cannot say that it is natural. Something marvelous has unfolded, worthy of our attention. The danger of these data is that we forget that miracles are signs. A certain scientific materialism takes over, “At last! We have proof of transubstantiation.” You, as reader, know this is not true, as we have already established that transubstantiation is not a physical change. But such a scientific attitude toward miracles, especially in a polemical context, can be used in the kind of apologetics that forget the reason for this miracle in the first place. We might say to an Evangelical Protestant or an unbelieving Catholic, “See, you have it wrong! You were wrong all along. He’s there. Now you know that we were right from the beginning.”
Miracles are certainly invitations to believe, but they are not instruments for bludgeoning our neighbor. Instead, the medical examination, the recognition that the blood is that of the heart, points us to the medieval and early modern devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is no accident that Pope Francis, as Cardinal Bergoglio, was responsible for investigating the Eucharistic miracle in Buenos Aires—he will also likely be the Pontiff canonizing Carlo in April. In his recent encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Pope Francis concludes the first chapter with the following paragraph, which can help us remember the significance of bleeding Hosts that have the cellular structure of a bleeding, wounded heart:
In the end, that Sacred Heart is the unifying principle of all reality, since “Christ is the heart of the world, and the paschal mystery of his death and resurrection is the center of history, which, because of him, is a history of salvation.” All creatures “are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things.” In the presence of the heart of Christ, I once more ask the Lord to have mercy on this suffering world in which he chose to dwell as one of us. May he pour out the treasures of his light and love, so that our world, which presses forward despite wars, socio-economic disparities, and uses of technology that threaten our humanity, may regain the most important and necessary thing of all: its heart (§31).
In these modern Eucharistic miracles, maybe the Lord is asking us to be attentive to the suffering of this world, to all those places where divine mercy is absent. Christ is the center of our history, and everything we are tempted to put in its place will lead to a world devoid of love. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are eras of us doing exactly that, replacing mercy and love with totalitarian power, might, and a cool indifference to the suffering of those on the margins: the unborn, the migrant, the prisoner, and the elderly. The Eucharist bleeds today, inviting us to remember that the ultimate protagonist of history is the one who was born for us, lived for us, died for us, was raised for us, and still loves us. Every time we go to Mass, we receive him anew: the merciful love of God is available to us not as an abstract idea or ideology but in his Person. And it is a merciful love given to us, so that we might offer this mercy anew, to make that love the heart of our reality.
Conclusion
All of this brings us back, in the end, to Carlo. That soon-to-be saint who had a love of the reality of the Eucharist. He saw in Eucharistic miracles an invitation for each person to see the world differently, to let a revolution of tenderness unfold in the heart of each recipient of this love. He did not stop at the miracles, employing them as debate points in online apologetics about true presence. Rather, he presented them as icons of Christ’s merciful love, of the presence of that redemption available to us on every altar of every parish church.
The miracles are catalysts for Eucharistic amazement. Most of us will never see bleeding or luminous Hosts in our lifetime. But that does not mean that redemption is any less real. It does not mean that we cannot behold this redemption in the normal way that the Church celebrates each day: Lord, I am not worthy to receive You, but only say the Word, and my soul shall be healed.
It is always dangerous to do so, but in contemplating these Eucharistic miracles through the eyes of Carlo, I want to offer a subtle addition to what the Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, said about Eucharistic miracles. Yes, Eucharistic miracles are not proof of transubstantiation. But the miracles might be more closely related to this doctrine than we imagine. Joseph Ratzinger has argued for a personalist account of transubstantiation. In the transformation of the elements at the level of substance, bread and wine no longer exist as self-subsistent entities. They have become entirely taken up into God’s Being without losing their creaturely status. They exist not for themselves but in Christ. Christ has bound himself to this material mediation upon the altar, not trapped in the Host, but he gives himself through this transfigured matter that must be broken, given, and poured out. At times, through God’s power, is it surprising that this transfigured matter behaves precisely like the Body of Christ? Sometimes, bleeding. Sometimes, luminous. Sometimes, healing and saving us from tsunamis, as one Eucharistic miracle in Columbia testifies?
These Eucharistic miracles uncover for us, who tend to forget, that matter matters in our salvation. God entered into time and space and never left us behind, ascended to the right hand of the Father, interceding for us mortal creatures as the God-man. Recently, Notre Dame dedicated a new reliquary chapel at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, made possible through the generosity of Tim and Mary Sullivan. The early Church treated these relics with the same devotion that we give to the Blessed Sacrament. Polycarp’s death is described as bread baking, as incense ascending into heaven. This is because Polycarp’s whole being has been taken up into Christ. His death has become an extension of Christ’s self-giving at the Last Supper and Christ’s death upon the cross. His relics now are luminous signs that death does not have the last word, that Polycarp is present to us when we pause before the relics. If you visit the Basilica, yes, the relics are reminders of virtuous people. But they are more than that—they are the living, efficacious sacramental signs of the flesh and blood nature of sanctity. That Christ is real, and you can see him through the presence of all the saints.
In the end, Carlo’s weirdness was this: he recognized this fact. God is real. Jesus is real. My life is real. And if I am to really live, in a way that matters, I must let my substance become Christ’s. I must be transubstantiated into him.
And when we face the hour of our death, even as we suffer from the kind of cancer that Carlo did, we can pierce through the veil of tears and see that at the heart of it all is the reality of love.
The penultimate words of this paper belong to Carlo’s mother, Antonia, who was taught to recognize that indeed our lives have been given to us so that they might become entirely divine. She learned this through the witness of her son, who mas more saint than sigma, more mystic than meme:
Carlo . . . taught me to direct my everyday life toward the seeking of the absolute, of grace. To do this, one must constantly tap into the sacraments, go look for them, attend them. Living while looking toward the absolute helps us to see that every instant our life is full of an unimaginable light. And in this way, everything is transformed, everything becomes new, the light inhabits our lives, even in unremarkable or dark times. Everything turns in the direction of eternity (31).
Holy Carlo, pray for us.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally delivered as a Saturdays with the Saints lecture, sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life, on November 9, 2024.
The author wishes to dedicate this article to the memory of his colleague and friend, Greg Hillis, who died from cancer in October of 2024.