The old saw has it that if you meet people from Cape Town at a social event, as a conversational gambit they always ask you where you went to school. If you meet people from Joburg, they ask you what you do for a living. And I guess, if they’re from Durban, they tell you that.
At one of the Open Book Festival events last week, this happened to me. Someone I’d met at the negroni bar (and that’s how you can tell I’m from Cape Town) discovered that my day job is involved with the murky world of information integrity, and he made the mistake of asking me how we can even tell what is true any more. Our conversation went down the well-worn paths, which almost always end up with the despairing question: but how can people be so stupid as to believe patently false things?
I gently tried to tell him it was human nature. After all, I said, Christians believe that people returned from the dead, and Muslims that Jesus could perform miracles. Humans are just a faith-based species. We’ve always believed false things, why would we expect anything to have changed?
But that’s different, he said. Believing in, for example, the Virgin Mary and Immaculate Conception is something that happened a long time ago, and we just happen to have kept believing in it. Believing in some of the nonsense conspiracy theories doing the rounds is different, because there’s no actual current proof.
At which point I said, hold my negroni, and told him the story of the influencer saint.
On Sunday September 7, Pope Leo XIV held a canonisation mass for two of the Catholic Church’s latest saints, one of whom is Carlo Acutis, known as the influencer saint. St Carlo was an Italian “computer whizz kid”, we are told, who died of leukaemia in 2006 at the age of 15. Carlo built multilingual websites to spread Catholic teaching, which, quaintly, is how he got his nickname “God’s influencer”. He was canonised by the pope alongside Pier Giorgio Frassati, another young Catholic activist, who died a century ago.
The Guardian relates that “an hour before the mass, St Peter’s Square had filled with tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the world, many of them millennial Italians and Americans, as Carlo’s family looked on. A crowd numbering an estimated 80,000 braved sweltering heat, and many were forced to spill out into the boulevards next to the square, with witnesses describing the atmosphere as joyous and party-like.”
At the event, according to Reuters, the pope said: “All of you, all of us together, are called to be saints.” The two new saints, he added, “are an invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards [to heaven].”
All of which is touching, and really, who could argue with Carlo’s saintliness. Except that’s not how you get to be a saint. If it was that easy, everyone would be doing it. To reach Blessing level (I’m doing St Carlo the courtesy of using gaming terminology) you need to perform two miracles after you die, and for most candidates — unless you’re a martyr — one miracle attributed to their intercession after death is required. To level up from Blessed to Saint, a second miracle (after beatification) has to be verified.
St Carlo, as he is now, was credited with the “miracle of the pancreatic healing”, which is described by a random site called Hozana. “A Brazilian child suffering from a severe pancreatic malformation was miraculously healed after his family and loved ones prayed to the teenager. Medical experts found no scientific explanation. The healing was thus attributed to Carlo and recognised by the pope during his beatification process. He was officially declared Blessed on October 10 2020.”
The Catholic News Agency (CNA) carries the news of the second miracle, which was the miraculous healing of a 21-year-old from Costa Rica named Valeria Valverde, who seriously injured her head in a bicycle accident in 2022. Her family was told that she could die at any moment.
Six days after the accident, Valeria’s mother went on a pilgrimage to the tomb of Blessed Carlo to pray for the healing of her daughter, leaving a written note. You’d think an e-mail or tweet to the influencer saint would have been more appropriate, but there you have it.
“On that same day, Valeria began to breathe on her own and on the following day she recovered the use of her upper limbs and partly recovered her speech. Valeria was discharged from the intensive care unit 10 days after her mother’s pilgrimage. Two months after her accident, she went on a pilgrimage to Carlo Acutis’s tomb in Assisi with her mother to celebrate her complete healing.”
The key word in the information space isn’t truth. It’s belief
St Carlo’s tomb seems to be quite the place. A Guardian article describes it: “Over the past year, more than a million people have flocked to the central Italian town of Assisi, where Acutis’s body — covered in a wax mould of his likeness and dressed in his blue tracksuit top, jeans and trainers — is on view behind a glass-panelled case in Santa Maria Maggiore church.
“His heart is in a gold casket in the town’s San Rufino Cathedral, while pieces of tissue from his pericardium — the membrane enclosing the heart — have toured the world in the lead-up to his canonisation. A bronze life-size statue of him is also on display in the town. His mother, Antonia Salzano, has also travelled across the globe, delivering speeches to Catholic communities about her son’s life, bringing strands of her son’s hair as gifts.”
To those of us not part of the cult, it seems a little ghoulish to takes chunks of someone’s body around the world on a marketing tour, but it’s long been the Catholic way. In fact, one of the signs of sainthood is an incorrupt body, which basically refers to the preservation of a saint’s body after death, resisting normal decomposition without artificial preservation like embalming.
The CNA again: “Incorruptibility is the preservation of the body from normal decay after death. According to Catholic tradition, incorruptible saints give witness to the truth of the resurrection of the body and the life that is to come. While the church no longer requires incorruptibility as a miracle for canonisation, finding a body incorrupt can strengthen the case for sainthood.” Reassuringly, we are told that the church thoroughly investigates cases of incorruption to rule out natural explanations before accepting this phenomenon as a sign of sanctity.
Alas, St Carlo is not one of the incorruptible saints, though the CNA tells us that photos of the holy teen caused some confusion online after his body was displayed for public veneration leading up to his beatification in 2020.
“The bishop of Assisi clarified that though Carlo Acutis’s body appeared intact in photos, that was due to the use of a silicone reconstruction of his face — the blessed’s body had been found in a normal state of decay when exhumed 14 years after his death in 2006.” Apparently, nobody finds it odd to take photos of a rotting corpse and share them online. The influencer saint indeed.
All of which is to say, as I did to my interlocutor at the bar who questioned how people can believe things without evidence, that the key word in the information space isn’t truth. It’s belief.
St Carlo, who appears to have been fond of speaking in motivational poster sound bites, is remembered for saying: “People who place themselves before the sun get a tan; people who place themselves before the Eucharist become saints.” In this compound sentence with parallel clauses, the first clause is science, the other is gobbledegook. And that’s pretty much how people get to believe in miracles, by harnessing the one to the other despite the absence of an actual connection.
Science can’t explain how Valeria was brought back from death’s door? Then it must be a miracle. Absence of proof is proof itself, and this is the impossible task faced by all those fact-checkers and journalists devoted to debunking disinformation. I would pray to St Isidore of Seville, who was named as patron saint of the internet by Pope John Paul II in 1997, but I fear it wouldn’t do much good.
In a sense, the influencer saint is the most honest thing to come out of the Catholic Church in a while. A story this week in SciTechDaily describes the comments of Nicole Oresme (circa 1325-1382), a renowned Norman theologian and later Bishop of Lisieux.
Commenting on the Shroud of Turin, believed by many to be the burial shroud of Jesus, Oresme asserts: “I do not need to believe anyone who claims: ‘Someone performed such a miracle for me,’ because many clergymen thus deceive others, in order to elicit offerings for their churches.”
Isn’t that the whole of online disinformation right there? Playing on people’s susceptibility to belief in order to make money. I propose we make St Carlo the patron saint of traffic, engagement, conversions and revenue.
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