In July of last year I interviewed filmmaker Tim Moriarty for The Catholic Spirit in connection with his documentary Jesus Thirsts: The Miracle of the Eucharist. His latest nonfiction film, Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality, blends Eucharistic themes with concerns about digital technology as these motifs converge in the life and spirituality of Millennial saint-to-be Carlo Acutis. Acutis died in 2006 at the age of 15; his canonization is set for September 7. I recently caught up with Moriarty via phone. Our discussion has been edited for length and clarity.
SDG: Anytime I write about anything, even reviewing a movie, it’s always a learning process, so making a movie has to be at least as much a learning process. I’m curious what you learned about Carlo Acutis that most surprised you.
Moriarty: Early on, I didn’t know a ton about him. The narrative, at least on the outside, was that Carlo was this young Millennial, and he was online, using the internet, and isn’t that great? But very early on, when we met his mother, she was pretty strong that his use of the internet and of digital technology was very moderate — that he was very aware of the dangers.
I think the idea that Carlo was simply just this digital online saint is a disservice to who he was. His life was spent off screens, really encountering the world and loving the world and loving Christ. The digital stuff was really just a means of sharing that love.
SDG: Why do you think there is that tendency to simplify the complexities of a person’s life around one idea?
I think we’ll probably look back at the way we look at screens today the way we look at how people were smoking cigarettes back in the ’50s, and say: How could we have done that? What were we thinking?
Moriarty: That’s a great question. In a way, human beings do that with all our saints — we try to box them in. This is just conjecture, but one impulse would be to take away the challenge that Carlo poses. Carlo exhibited the virtue of temperance, especially with regard to digital technology. This is one of the things that we’re starting to become aware of, with books like [The Anxious Generation by] Jonathan Haidt and some of the work being done regarding the way we’re all addicted to screens. I think we’ll probably look back at the way we look at screens today the way we look at how people were smoking cigarettes back in the ’50s, and say: How could we have done that? What were we thinking?
We did an interview with Monsignor James Shea, who’s connected with the University of Mary. He quoted G.K. Chesterton, who says that each generation gets, not the saint that it wants, but the saint that it needs. In many ways the saint is an antidote to the ills of the age. And Carlo has really universally been hailed as the saint of our age. So we wanted to take an examination of what are the ills of our age, and what might he be an antidote to?
SDG: So let’s talk about that. The film explores deleterious psychological and social effects of digital technology, but there’s also a larger exploration of the role of science and technology from its roots, and its relationship to alchemy and magic and the philosophy of Francis Bacon. Obviously you don’t want to condemn science and technology root and branch. How do you thread that needle in terms of the good and the bad in science and technology?
Moriarty: We wanted to take a look at where it is when science goes awry. And we felt like we needed to go back to the roots of this severing of a sort of scientism, or science as worldview, from a whole theological vision of life. At the root is a desire to exert one’s will over reality. That’s at the root of magical thinking, where we’re no longer receiving reality as a gift. And that’s really at the heart of the Eucharist. We receive the Eucharist as a gift. “Eucharist” means “thanksgiving.”
We take ourselves off the hook when the saints become totally separate from our experience. When somebody looks similar to us, wearing the same clothes, it makes one a little uneasy, because we’re called to be saints as well!
Part of a scientistic point of view is that reality is just stuff for us to manipulate, and we exert our will over reality without any sense that reality has a structure to it. Now we have technologies where we can literally create anything we want — where the body and the material world, that used to be an object of contemplation and wonder now dissolves entirely into a virtual domain where we can become avatars and attempt to defeat death itself.
The digital revolution didn’t happen overnight. There’s something that happened centuries ago, and at the root of it is this move away from a sacramental worldview. And this is why a recovery of a deep sense of the Eucharist as the source and summit of life is the only antidote we have to a scientism run amok.
SDG: Have you gotten any pushback or responses from, let’s say, people who are not fans either of Carlo himself or of his canonization cause?
Moriarty: You know, there were some folks who felt like it was maybe pushed too quickly, or who had a superficial understanding of Carlo. One commentator did a whole video about how he didn’t understand why Carlo is a saint — he felt the Church is just trying to throw a bone to young people. I shared the film with him, and he did a second video about why he felt a much deeper appreciation for Carlo. So there have been fruitful conversations with those who maybe aren’t big fans.
SDG: On the one hand, there are traditionally-minded Catholics inclined to resist the iconography of a saint in jeans and sneakers…
Any real saint transcends the petty political categories that those of us who aren’t as holy love to muck around in.
Moriarty: There are actually two sides that are unhappy with Carlo! On the one hand you have some critiquing Carlo’s Eucharistic theology, and on the other hand you have those who find the saint in sneakers and jeans offensive. There’s something jarring about that because of the way we see our saints as almost superhuman — they seem so far away from us. We take ourselves off the hook when the saints become totally separate from our experience. When somebody looks similar to us, wearing the same clothes, it makes one a little uneasy, because we’re called to be saints as well!
SDG: So let’s look at the other side of the equation! You also have progressive-minded Catholics inclined to resist a teenaged saint from a wealthy background significantly known for his devotion to Eucharistic miracles.
Moriarty: Carlo had a deep mystical connection with Christ in the Eucharist, but he was also deeply moved by passion for the poor and the homeless in his hometown of Milan. Very similar to the way Mother Teresa and her sisters spent time in Eucharistic adoration in order to then go out and find Christ in the poor. He did the same in the streets of Milan, giving sleeping bags to homeless people and sharing his lunch with them. He worked in a soup kitchen. He was doing the things that traditional saints of the past have done.
Any real saint transcends the petty political categories that those of us who aren’t as holy love to muck around in. It wasn’t as if he was just into Eucharistic miracles simply for their novelty or the bizarre quality — it was because he saw the effect that they had on his own classmates who were totally numb to the theology of the Church. He found Eucharistic miracles to be tremendous tools for evangelization among his peers as conversation starters. He was in a post-Christian European setting where scientism had totally taken over. It was still the early 2000s; the New Atheists had taken quite a hold in the collective psyche.
SDG: There’s no getting around the serious divisions of our day both in the church and in the larger world. Pope Leo XIV has emphasized working for unity as a priority for his papacy. Does a saint like Carlo have significance for Christian unity?
Moriarty: One of Carlo’s mottos was “Not I, but God.” You can create a superficial unity by saying, “Let’s talk about our common points of agreement and let’s forget about our differences.” And there may be value in that. But the mystical body of Christ really being the place where all unity ultimately converges and is going to come about through being connected to Christ.
Carlo’s whole life was centered on Christ. In the ordinary circumstances of his life, he tried to be a light for others, to act as Christ to his friends and those he encountered. If we all did that, I think a lot of the divisions in the world would dissolve. I hope his canonization will help bring some healing to these divisions.
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