By Charles Murphy
“St Carlo Acutis offers more than a fresh face for an ancient Church,” writes Charles Murphy, exploring how the relic of this modern saint carries deep spiritual and emotional weight in our digital age. As the Romero Prayer says, “It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view” — and this story invites us to see ourselves as others see us, offering a moment to reflect on how God’s grace shapes our lives.
At Our Lady of Dolours Catholic Church in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood lies two strands of human hair resting in a golden pin. The hairs form the shape of a cross and are encased under glass, and the pin is inscribed with the Latin phrase ex capillis Carolis Acutis, directly translating to ‘from the hair of Carlo Acutis (Catholic Diocese of Broken Bay, 2025).
The relic is not a medieval artefact dug out of a mystical European monastery from the twelfth century, but rather belonged to Carlo Acutis, a Catholic boy who, in 2006, died at the age of 15 from an aggressive form of leukaemia which took his life in a matter of weeks. Having been canonised on 7 September 2025, Carlo Acutis’ makes his mark in history by being the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint (Swan, 2024).
The ironic juxtaposition at play between the archaic relic made of hair belonging to a teenager who built websites and spread the word of God through Xbox Live game chats forms a curious question. In an era of smartphones, livestreamed Masses, and artificial intelligence Jesus chatbots, how does the physical relic of a modern millennial saint still hold so much spiritual and emotional power? Carlo Acutis represents more than just a fresh face for an ancient institution. His canonisation and veneration reflects how Catholicism is blending digitalisation with deep ritual traditions.
An episode of ABC’s ‘Soul Search’ series helps us to understand how Carlo Acutis is being received and revered in contemporary Catholicism. In the interview, ABC journalist Rohan Salmond is guided by Father David Ranson through Our Lady of Dolours Catholic Church in Chatswood, a suburb in Sydney's North Shore. Father David Ranson says that “with a Catholic primary school, boys’ high school, and girls’ high school all on the same block, there are thousands of Catholic children roaming around the Church grounds, coming in and out of the Church, and making it a lively place to be” (Ranson, 2025). He has noticed an increase in interest amongst the Catholic school children next door since Carlo Acutis’ relic arrived. Leaving the noisy main part of the Church where children are flowing in and out after school, the journalist and Priest enter a much quieter and newly built chapel set apart, that is dedicated to the first-class relic of Carlo Acutis.
In Catholic tradition, a first-class relic is a belonging of a saint that contains a part of their body. Salmond and Ranson continue their podcast interview in a hushed tone to not disturb two ladies who are engaged in veneration prayers to Carlo Acutis’ relic. The ritual significance of relics stretches back to the earliest centuries of Christianity when believers sought physical proximity to the holiness of saints and martyrs through bones, clothing, and even blood. Since Acutis’ canonisation, Our Lady of Dolours in Chatswood has become a new pilgrimage site, drawing hundreds of Catholics in just the first few weeks of the relic’s appearance.
It brings forth an interesting situation in which the Church has built a new chapel not for a figure of ancient scripture, but for a teenager who played Pokemon, coded websites, and loved computers, and also attended Mass daily and lived by a devotion to the Eucharist.
Anthropologist Steven Hooper writes that “throughout human history, special personages – gods, ancestors, kings, queens, saints, heroes, celebrities – have been regarded as sources of power. Their body parts, items their bodies have touched, and images made of them, have, by the operation of a mechanism of transfer and equivalence, also been attributed with power” (2014). It is this very mechanism, the transfer of sacred power from the soul through to the body, that gives a relic its holy charge. In the case of Carlo Acutis’ relic, the strands of hair are not merely mementos, but allow his spiritual power to be accessed through physical proximity. This can be seen through Father David Ranson’s personification of the relic. Throughout the interview, he does not refer to it as ‘the relic’, but instead, refers to the relic as if it is Carlo Acutis, calling it things such as “Carlo”, “him”, “his” (2025). This type of transfer that Hooper refers to is present in the personhood and physical presence afforded to the material remains of the modern saint, Carlo Acutis.
In many ways, relics are part of what anthropologists such as Hooper call the ‘material economy of holiness’. They are circulated, displayed, and sometimes even contested, much like other objects of high symbolic value. Art Historian, Patrick Geary asks, “Could one reasonably describe a human body or portions thereof as destined for circulation? Can we really compare the production and circulation of saints’ remains to that of gold in prehistoric Europe, cloth in pre-revolutionary France, or qat in northeastern Africa?” (2014). His answer is yes. Geary reminds us that “relics were almost universally understood to be important sources of personal supernatural power and formed the primary focus of religious devotion throughout Europe from the eighth through to the twelfth century – they were bought and sold, stolen or divided, much as any other commodity was” (2014).
Carlo Acutis’ relics, including the one in Chatswood, Sydney, have toured the world, drawing thousands of people. The contemporary circulation of Acutis’ relics mimics ancient patterns of relic veneration. The irony is that although relic veneration is an ancient tradition, Acutis had a modern and technological worldview. He envisioned the internet as a tool for spreading traditional Catholic ideology. Though often celebrated as “patron saint of the internet” and “God’s online influencer” (Swan, 2024), Acutis was doctrinally conservative, known for defending the reverence of the Eucharist and encouraging daily Mass attendance. Thus, his digital presence does not represent a liberal or secularised Catholicism, but one that is spiritually traditional and spread through modern forms of communication such as the internet, video games and live streams.
The organic and perishable hair of Acutis is the anchor that makes the holiness of the relic real, tangible, and emotionally immediate. Anthropologist, Tanya Luhrmann has written extensively on how spiritual experiences often depend on material and sensory practices, such as smells, textures and spaces, that make the invisible world feel more real (Luhrmann & Cassaniti, 2014). ‘Kindling practices’ such as the veneration of relics create a shared mental space among individuals where people learn to think, feel and interact as if their invisible others, in this case God, Jesus Christ, or Carlo Acutis, are present in their lives.
Carlo Acutis’ canonisation tells us something about the direction the Catholic Church is heading in the twenty-first century, especially under the leadership of Pope Leo XIV. The Church is not turning its back on tradition in order to appeal to younger generations; instead it is repackaging tradition using the tools, language and aesthetics of contemporary culture. The veneration of Carlo Acutis shows that relics are not archaic leftovers from a superstitious medieval past, but enduring instruments of connection between the material and spiritual worlds.
Image top-right: The entry to the tomb of Carlos Acutis in Assisi, courtesy of Paul Osborne ACBC.