Juan Villoro
Umberto Eco said Pope John Paul II represented “the Middle Ages plus television”. In 2024, the helmsman of St. Peter’s boat has modernized enough to represent the Middle Ages plus the Internet.
No religion has given as much impetus to images as Catholicism. If the Protestant Reformation wanted to limit idolatry by eliminating the proliferation of angels and saints, the Catholic Church reacted by promoting the Baroque, which filled every corner of the altars with ornaments. Logically, the belief system that found a thousand ways to paint the annunciation of Mary, the descent from the cross, or the adoration of the Kings now takes advantage of the screens to unite devotion with Photoshop.
What is the space of faith? Human beings can orient their lives around the notions of hell, purgatory, and paradise without touching any of these places. Like the theological virtues, the areas of morality are intangible.
At the dawn of the cybernetic revolution, Umberto Eco shrewdly noted that IBM’s processors, austerely powered by letters, obeyed Protestant ethics, while Apple’s colorful iconography drew on the resources of Catholic evangelization.
Religious dealings with technology have led to some paradoxes. Juan José Millás points out that cloistered nuns have ceased to be cloistered; without going out into the street, they break the rules of enclosure by spending the whole day on the Internet, the meeting place of the flock.
It’s no wonder that a religion based on visual miracles is about to have its first digital saint. This is Carlo Acutis, an Italian born in London in 1991. He died in Monza in 2006 of leukemia and dedicated his short life to spreading the gospel on social networks.
His Polish nanny instilled faith in him. Since he was a child, he wanted to visit churches; he received his first communion at seven and alternated prayers with a passion that forces one to believe in miracles (soccer) and another that represents them (video games).
With an angelical face and an easy smile, Acutis enchanted those who treated him during the fifteen years of his earthly life. He fought bullying at his school and used the Internet with the rebellious sense of primitive Christians. In the swamp of haters, lynchings, and unbridled self-promotion on the net, he acted as a heterodox who promoted goodness and announced Eucharistic miracles. Educated on the PlayStation, he did not use the boring pedagogy of the catechists. If Jesus recruited the apostles with the simple wisdom of his phrases (“Man does not live by bread alone”), Acutis did the same with the digital tribe: “You were born original: do not live as a photocopy”.
Pope Francis grasped the importance of his message and praised him in this way: “He has known how to use the new communication techniques to transmit the Gospel”. The site www.miracolieucaristici.org multiplied the followers as if it were reiterating the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
Aware of his role, the young cybernaut designed a “kit to be a saint”, which, unlike the survival backpacks, did not consist of objects but of rules of conduct: weekly confession, Eucharistic adoration, willingness to give up anything for the sake of others.
What was most striking about his religious vocation was the joy with which he carried it out. Faithful to the networked dynamic, he operated on his own, without submitting to the restrictive rules of a congregation, and did not want to wear any other habit than the soccer jersey of Milan, the team he loved.
After his death, he was taken to Assisi, the final resting place of St. Francis, where his body was exhibited in jeans and a sweatshirt. Thus, it closed one destiny and began another. A Brazilian boy suffering from a severe pancreatic disease was healed after entrusting himself to Acutis, who was beatified in 2020. A second miracle occurred in 2022 when a girl from Costa Rica recovered from a cranioencephalic traumatism thanks to her family’s prayers to “God’s influencer”.
The Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints required three miracles to attain certified sainthood, but in an age that loves rebates, it is already satisfied with two. Acutis will be canonized.
The world’s first explanation was magical. Although technology defines the digital age, we turn on the computer in expectation of a miracle.
This piece was published in Spanish by Reforma on May 31, 2024
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