Carlo Acutis dies in Monza in 2006, at fifteen years old and with a half-updated website. He did not catalogue listening processes or synodal itineraries: he catalogued Eucharistic miracles and apparitions of the Virgin, the two archives that a teenager with a computer considered urgent before dying. The Church has taken almost two decades to raise him to the altars. In understanding what he left us, it will take us a little longer: that faith rests on two pillars, the Eucharist and Mary, and that everything else is scaffolding.
A priest summed it up for me a few days ago with an economy that Roman documents would envy. Those are the two keys, he told me. Everything that the wicked attack. Everything that sustains us.
I know of no treatise on ecclesiology that improves on those two sentences.
History, moreover, proves the priest right. Every serious assault on the Church has begun by firing there. The Cathars denied the altar before anything else. Cranmer dismantled the Mass while Henry VIII’s men burned the image of Walsingham, and in ’36 the militiamen shot images of the Virgin and blew up tabernacles with a fury they never devoted to social encyclicals (no one has ever profaned a pastoral plan). The Church’s worst enemies have always had excellent aim.
Today’s progressives do not overthrow, they dissolve. They do not profane the tabernacle, they move it to a side chapel where it does not bother. They do not deny the real presence, they stop mentioning it, which is cleaner. The Mass becomes assembly, encounter, shared table, and two generations later the result is measured by Pew: seven out of ten American Catholics believe the Eucharist is a symbol. Mission accomplished without breaking a single ciborium.
With Mary the procedure is identical. From Immaculate to believing woman of her people, from Mediatrix of all graces to pastoral resource for the month of May. The rosary, dismissed as a devotion of elderly ladies.
The reason for so much insistence is simple: the two are scandalously concrete. The Eucharist is not an idea of God, it is God there, in the eleven o’clock line. Mary is not an archetype of the feminine, she is a mother with a name, a neighbor from Nazareth, the carnal guarantee that it really happened. Progressives speak of processes, paths, dynamics, listening… An entire vocabulary designed so that nothing is ever fully present. What they cannot bear is the Presence. Against a value one can dialogue indefinitely. Against a Body, one cannot.
And meanwhile, what grows in the Church grows exactly there. Chapels of perpetual adoration with the four-in-the-morning shifts covered, men’s rosaries filling squares from Seville to Warsaw, the pilgrimage of Chartres or Covadonga hanging the “sold out” sign like a concert, an American football stadium in silence before a monstrance in Indianapolis.
No one makes a pilgrimage to a synodal process.
Acutis said it without a doctorate: the Eucharist is my highway to heaven. Of the rosary he said it was the shortest ladder to climb it. Leo XIV canonized him last September before a square overflowing with young people, which is exactly the image that progressives cannot manage to explain. The enemy, on the other hand, understands it perfectly well. He fires at the Eucharist and fires at Mary because he knows that everything rests there, and in that aim he unwittingly leaves us with the treasure map drawn.