Carlo Acutis

At seven he made his First Communion and asked for more: Mass daily from then on, and a stretch of quiet before the tabernacle after it. Nobody pushed him there. His mother could count her own lifetime Masses on one hand; her son led her back in. When anyone asked why he went, he gave the same answer every time — the Eucharist is my highway to heaven. An odd sentence from a boy in trainers, until you watch what it organised.

Everything people quote about him hangs off that centre. The one hour of gaming a week — a line he drew at eight and never moved — was not discipline for its own sake; it is what attention looks like when it is already promised elsewhere. Rajesh Mohur, the family’s au pair, a Hindu from Mauritius, watched him pray, asked his questions, and in the end asked for baptism. His mother tells of pocket money that kept turning into sleeping bags for the men outside Milan’s churches.

The famous project was the same devotion, with a keyboard. From eleven he catalogued reported Eucharistic miracles — more than a hundred cases, country by country, dates, places and sources attached — and put them online in 2004: hand-built pages, two and a half years of evenings. Not an argument. A reference work about the thing he loved, made the slow way.

The exhibition built from those panels premiered in Rome on 4 October 2006. Carlo missed it; he was in hospital in Monza with acute leukaemia, saying he would offer what came “for the Lord, for the Pope and for the Church.” He died on 12 October, fifteen years old, ill for less than a week — and ready, it seems, for years.

He liked to say that everyone is born an original and many die as photocopies. The line is on t-shirts now, which proves nothing either way. Take it as he meant it: copying is what a life does by default, and originality is not self-expression — it is having a centre nothing on a screen can overwrite. He lies in Assisi in jeans and trainers. The panels still travel, parish to parish, on six continents. The original held.