BLESSED CARLO TALK

A parish event in Troy is set to preview a saintly story that soon will receive worldwide attention as the Catholic Church honors a teenager’s holiness.

Blessed Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006 at the age of 15, will be canonized this spring as the first saint of the “millennial” generation.

On Feb. 12, Our Lady of Victory Church in Troy will host a special gathering to get to know this millennial better.

It will feature a speaker who welcomed Blessed Carlo’s mother during her visit to the United States last year. Father Anthony Sorgie will convey some of the inspiring personal stories she shared with him.

Father Sorgie, pastor of Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Our Lady Parish in Tuckahoe, N.Y., will also display a first-class relic which the visitor from Italy gifted to American Catholics.

The first-class designation refers to a fragment of the physical remains of a beatified or canonized person. Authenticated relics of saints are venerated — used to praise God through that holy person. Blessed Carlo will be proclaimed a saint on April 27.

Father Sorgie, a popular lecturer and former seminary professor, benefited from his knowledge of the Italian language and culture in learning from Antonia Salzano Acutis, who raised her son in Milan.

He died of leukemia and was beatified by the Church in 2020.

“It’s not often that you can meet and hear from the mother of a soon-to-be-canonized saint,” said Father Thomas Morrette, pastor of the Catholic Community of Our Lady of Victory in Troy and Our Lady of the Snow Mission in Grafton.

The life experience of Antonia Acutis, which will be described during the Feb. 12 event, beginning at 7 p.m., “speaks to many today,” Father Morrette said. “She was a non-practicing Catholic whose son’s interest in the faith brought her back to the faith.”

The story of Blessed Carlo also includes his fervent compassion for others, special devotion to the Holy Eucharist and an intimate relationship with Jesus, all combined in a typical teenager’s life.

He has already inspired countless people internationally, and Antonia Acutis came to the U.S. to spread the word about him. He has been called “God’s Influencer,” using a term for current-day creators of digital content reaching out to audiences via computer.

Alongside his interests in soccer and video games, Blessed Carlo became skilled in web design, even building an extensive website with his research on Eucharistic miracles around the world. The site has been translated into multiple languages.

Father Morrette said his plan to hold an event honoring the boy is largely based on the youth’s love for the Eucharist — a force for evangelization, especially to upcoming generations.

Antonia wrote a book, “My Son Carlo,” recalling that he made an effort to attend Mass every day and to participate frequently in Eucharistic Adoration.

The book quoted Carlo saying, “I let God observe me, to dig deep inside me, to form my soul, to mold it.” The boy continued, “He is truly present, not an invention. He’s there. And if everyone could realize that, how they would run to it! If everyone believed in this truth, how their lives would change for the better!”

Blessed Carlo is also known as the “first millennial saint,” based on a term sociologists apply to people born between 1981 and 1996. (The birth years 1997-2012 have been grouped as “Generation Z,” and some call those born after 2012 “Gen Alpha.”)

His canonization in St. Peter’s Square will cap off the Vatican’s “Jubilee for Teenagers,” scheduled April 25-27.

This is one of the highlights expected to bring throngs of pilgrims to Rome in 2025, celebrating the Church’s Jubilee Holy Year and its theme of hope.

Late in July, the Vatican’s “Jubilee for Youth” is scheduled to include further outreach across the generations — the canonization of Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died in 1925 at the age of 24.

The preview event at Our Lady of Victory Church, at 7 p.m. on Feb. 12, is open to the public.