AN ITALIAN bishop has asked police to stop the online sale of suspicious relics from the London-born “internet saint” Blessed Carlo Acutis, before his canonisation in Rome later this month.
“There is an internet market, with a price list, for relics relating to various saints, including our St Francis — something impossible to accept,” the Bishop of Assisi-Nocera, the Rt Revd Domenico Sorrentino, explained.
“We don’t know whether these ones are true or false. But if they are all fabricated and based on deception, we’ll be witnessing not just a scam, but an insult to religious sentiment,” he said.
The statement was issued amid preparations for the canonisation, on 27 April, of Acutis, who died, aged 15, of leukaemia, and was beatified in October 2020 at his burial place in Assisi.
Bishop Sorrentino said that canon law prohibited the trading of relics, which could be dispensed only by bishops free of charge, and that he had asked Italian police and prosecutors to seize the items now being proposed for sale. “What can such idolisation of money achieve? I fear Satan has something to do with it,” he said.
Born in 1991, when his Italian parents were studying and working in Britain, Acutis attended a Jesuit-run high school after his family moved back to Milan, but died suddenly on 12 October 2006, two years after creating a website documenting eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions, in 17 languages.
The teenager was reinterred in 2019 at Santa Maria Maggiore, in Assisi, and beatified after recognition of a miracle involving the cure of a Brazilian boy from pancreatic cancer.
Media reports said that locks of hair, purportedly from Acutis, had been offered anonymously online, priced at €2000, along with other objects now being investigated by prosecutors from Perugia near by.
The canonisation in St Peter’s Square of Acutis, who was baptised at Our Lady of Dolours, Chelsea, are to form part of the RC Church’s late-April Jubilee of Teenagers, making him the first “millennial generation” saint.
Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims are expected to converge during the year on his tomb in Assisi, on the eighth centenary, in 2026, of the death of St Francis.