Saintly Inspiration at Rathdowne’s Carlo Acutis Primary
A teenager dubbed ‘God’s Influencer’ and proclaimed the Catholic Church’s first saint of the millennium holds a special pride of place for Villawood’s Rathdowne community at Wollert in Melbourne’s north.
Carlo Acutis Catholic Primary School is named in recognition of the London-born saint, who died of leukaemia at age 15 in 2006. He was canonised by Pope Leo at the weekend in The Vatican’s St Peter’s Square before a crowd of 60,000.
The so-called ‘cyber-apostle’ was beatified in 2020 after a Brazilian boy with a pancreatic defect was cured, following his mother’s prayers to Carlo to help her son.
A second miracle, required for sainthood, involved the reported healing of a Costa Rican girl who suffered a serious head injury after falling off her bicycle in Florence. Her mother prayed at Acutis’ tomb in Assisi, and her daughter made a full recovery.
Carlo came to prominence after building a website cataloguing every reported Eucharistic miracle and official apparition of Christ’s mother Mary around the world.
Carlo Acutis principal Damian Howard has visited Assisi in Italy, where Carlo’s body lies in state, and met with his mother, Antonia.
Numerous images he photographed of patterns and features in churches and sites in Assisi have been incorporated into graphics, artwork and decorative fixtures in the primary school, which opened this year.
The school is being built over four stages and will eventually educate some 600 pupils.
