McCarrick's Man in Rome and Acutis' Mother Behind Canonisation: Friends Didn’t Know He Was Religious
- Antonia Salzano, Carlo's wealthy mother, was a driving force behind the beatification in 2020 and the upcoming canonisation.
- She hired journalists to write books about him, and designers and artists to create paintings, posters, and prayer cards with his image.
- Another key figure in promoting Carlo's cult was Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo, a priest in his late 60s.
- Figueiredo moved to Assisi in 2020 after driving drunk and hitting a pregnant lawyer's car (who escaped without serious injury).
- He traveled to several countries with Carlo's relics and wrote the book "Blessed Carlo Acutis: 5 Steps to Being a Saint".
- Monsignor Figueiredo described Carlo in a strangely inarticulate way: "He cuts across boundaries, across faiths, because he is – what is the word I want? Not defenseless… There's nothing about him that would cause a problem."
- Figueiredo, who was ordained by Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, worked as McCarrick's secretary for several months in the 1990s. He remained loyal to McCarrick after he was transferred to work in the Roman Curia: "I was McCarrick's man in Rome," he said.
- Around 2008, Figueiredo was assigned to translate and deliver a letter to the Vatican Secretary of State in which McCarrick wrote that - while he had sometimes shared a bed with seminarians - any rumours of abuse were untrue.
- No school friend of Carlo's remembered Acutis as having been publicly devout.
- Carlo's best friend, Federico Oldani, said he hadn’t known him "to behave like a very pious boy" and that he hadn't even known Carlo was religious.
- Oldani and Acutis shared a passion for fast cars.
- Carlo was known for his love of comedy. Every week there was an Italian stand-up show on television, which was his viewing schedule. He liked best the kind of comedy found on "The Simpsons": self-referential, absurd, full of subtle shifts in tone and register. He would burn DVDs of his favorite episodes for his friends.
- Oldani remembers one day at school when everyone was engaged in laddish talk, and Carlo suddenly blurted out that he thought it was wrong to have sex before marriage. The group began to tease him. Carlo became so anxious that the topic was dropped.
- Carlo never talked to Oldani about Christ. Oldani knew that Carlo's parents were religious and that Carlo was culturally Christian, but he had no idea that Carlo was a fervent believer.
- Another of Carlo's friends, Michele del Vecchio, said he and Carlo would cut together funny videos of his pets.
- In middle school, the boys would rent the raunchy comedies of the early '90s and bring them back to Carlo's to watch. Oldani and del Vecchio remembered watching Eurotrip, a comedy that begins with Matt Damon singing about his affair with the hero’s girlfriend (quotation: I can’t believe he’s so trusting/While I’m right behind her thrusting). The episodic plot later involves the hero accidentally becoming pope. Carlo didn’t seem to care.
- The hagiographies say that faith was the center of Carlo's life. His parents may have seen it. But at his Catholic school, his reticence on the subject was so complete that when Carlo told Oldani he was making a website cataloging miracles, Oldani saw it more as an expression of his friend's passion for computer programming than anything else.
- Del Vecchio was the only unbaptized member of Carlo's class. People would tease him, saying he wasn't a child of God. "I remember that Carlo was the only one – the only one in my five years of school – who never made an issue of it."
- Carlo never tried to evangelise del Vecchio while Carlo's mother was most eager to convert him. "Carlo sometimes had to hold her back because she would say to him, 'Oh, Michele, I pray so much for you!'"
- The version of Carlo that was presented for the beatification process is unrecognisable to his friends.
- When Carlo's religion teacher was asked if Carlo was open about his faith at school, he replied: "Not so far as I know, no.". He witnessed that "he was very reserved. It was a bit 'Don’t let the right hand know what the left hand was doing.'"
- When his mother was confronted with Carlo's passion for "The Simpsons", she denied: "He had no time to watch television. He was teaching catechism, each day going to mass. And then the prayers. And then all the good works he did…That took up a lot of time."
- When asked why Carlo didn't share his faith with his friends at school, his mother insisted that he "touched" his friends' lives.
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