Three Miracles at Carlo Acutis Funeral Were Documented But the Fourth One.

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The Priest Reveals Now!

Three Miracles at Carlo Acutis Funeral Were Documented But the Fourth One.

The Priest Reveals Now! – YouTube

Transcripts:
My name is Father Giuseppe Torelli.

I am 67 years old.

I have been a Catholic priest for 41 years and I have spent 18 of those years keeping a secret that I was not entirely sure I had the right to tell.

Not because it was shameful.

Not because I doubted what happened, but because the first three miracles, the ones that were documented, photographed, submitted to the diocese, published in the local newspapers, investigated by the archdiocese, and eventually incorporated into Carlo Acutis’s beatification file,
those belong to the people they happened to.

The fourth one belonged to me.

And I was not sure for a very long time whether a priest’s private experience of grace was something to be shared publicly or held quietly, the way you hold certain prayers, not because they are secret, but because they are too specific and too personal to survive translation into ordinary language.

I think I have found the language now.

So, let me tell you about October 15th, 2006.

About three miracles I documented and one I did not.

I was the parish priest of Santa Maria Church in Milan in October 2006.

I had been assigned there for 6 years.

I knew my parishioners well, their names, their struggles, the particular texture of each family’s faith and doubt.

I knew who came to mass every day and who came only at Christmas and who had stopped coming entirely and why.

Carlo Acutis’s family attended Santa Maria.

I knew Carlo.

Not in the way that you know someone you have had long, significant conversations with.

In the way you know a parishioner who comes to mass regularly and has a quality about them that you notice without being able to fully articulate.

I want to tell you something about what it is like to be a parish priest for 40 years because I think it provides context for why what I am about to describe affected me the way it did.

You see a great many people in 40 years of parish ministry.

You see them at their best and their worst.

You baptize their children and bury their parents.

You sit with them in hospital rooms and at kitchen tables and in the confessional.

You become, over time, a kind of institutional memory for the families in your care, the person who has been present at all the significant moments and holds them together in a single continuous story.

You also become, over time, very good at recognizing the difference between ordinary faith and something else.

Ordinary faith is common and it is beautiful and it sustains people through their lives in ways that are real and important.

Something else is rare.

I had encountered it perhaps twice in 40 years before Carlo.

A quality of, I want to choose this word carefully, transparency.

As though the person is less opaque than ordinary people.

As though whatever is behind the ordinary surface of a human life is somehow more visible in them than in others.

Carlo had that quality.

I noticed it.

I did not know what to do with it.

I filed it away as one of those things that parish ministry occasionally produces and that do not fit neatly into any available category.

And then he died at 15.

And then the funeral happened.

And then I sat alone in an empty church with steady hands for the first time in 3 years.

And I understood finally what I had been looking at all along.

What I noticed about Carlo was the stillness.

He would arrive for early mass before school.

This was a habit I had observed since he was perhaps 12 or 13 and he would sit in the third pew from the front and he would be still in a way that the other young people in that church were never still.

Not the restless, impatient stillness of someone enduring something.

The genuine stillness of someone who wants to be exactly where they are.

I mentioned it to his mother, Antonia, once in passing after mass.

“Carlo has a very unusual quality of attention,” I said.

She smiled in the way that parents smile when someone has seen something true about their child.

“He says mass is his favorite part of the day,” she said.

“He says it’s when he gets to be closest to Jesus.

” I thought about that for a long time afterward.

A 14-year-old boy.

Closest to Jesus.

Favorite part of the day.

In my 41 years of parish ministry, I have met perhaps three people who spoke about the Eucharist that way.

Two of them were very old.

One of them was Carlo.

Carlo died on October 12th, 2006.

His parents called me that morning.

Andrea’s voice, when he told me, had the particular quality of someone speaking from very far inside themselves.

The voice of a father who had known this was coming and had not been able to fully prepare for it regardless.

I went to the hospital.

I sat with the family.

I said the prayers that needed to be said.

And then I began preparing for the funeral.

The service was scheduled for October 15th.

In the 3 days between Carlo’s death and his funeral, something happened that I had not anticipated and would not have predicted.

People began coming to the church, not for any scheduled service, not at any announced time, simply coming, standing in the nave, sitting in the pews, kneeling before the altar.

Some people I recognized as parishioners.

Many I had never seen before.

Word was spreading through the neighborhood, through the school, through the various networks of people whose lives Carlo had touched in ways I was only beginning to understand.

By October 14th, the day before the funeral, there had been perhaps 200 additional visitors to Santa Maria outside of regular mass times.

I began to understand that something was happening at this funeral that I needed to be prepared to witness carefully.

I brought my camera.

I brought extra paper for notes.

I arranged for two other priests to assist with the service because I had a feeling that my attention would need to be divided.

I was right.

The funeral mass on October 15th filled Santa Maria beyond its capacity.

More than 500 people.

School classmates in their uniforms.

Teachers.

Neighborhood families.

Elderly parishioners who had watched Carlo grow up.

Young people I did not recognize who had apparently found Carlo through his website about Eucharistic miracles and had come from outside Milan to be present.

I presided at the altar.

I watched.

During the mass itself, the atmosphere was unlike any funeral I had conducted in 41 years.

There was grief, genuine, deep grief, particularly among the parents and the young people who had been close to Carlo.

But underneath the grief or alongside it was something else.

A quality of presence in the room that I had felt before in certain extraordinary moments of liturgy, but never as strongly as I felt it that morning.

As though the air had changed.

As though something was in the room that was not usually in rooms.

After the mass, as the congregation moved forward to pay their respects at the white casket at the front of the nave, I stood to the side and watched.

And what happened over the next 40 minutes is documented in the report I submitted to the archdiocese in office on October 22nd, 2006.

I will summarize it here.

The first, Signora Elena Moretti, 73 years old, had been suffering from severe cataracts in both eyes for approximately 8 years.

Her vision had deteriorated to the point where she could no longer read or drive.

When she placed her hands on Carlo’s casket and prayed, she stepped back and removed her thick glasses with a confused expression.

She looked around the church.

She said, loudly enough for the people nearby to hear, “I can see.

I can see clearly.

” Her optometrist, Dr.

Farini, examined her 3 days later and confirmed complete resolution of the cataracts.

He stated in writing that he had no medical explanation.

The second, Marco Pellegrini, 34 years old, a construction worker who had suffered a severe herniated disk 18 months earlier.

He had been walking with significant difficulty and chronic pain since the injury, using a cane.

When he approached the casket, something shifted.

He described it later as a warmth moving through his lower back.

He put the cane aside and walked normally out of the church.

His specialist, Dr.

Conforti, examined him the following week and found the herniation resolved.

He submitted a written statement to the diocese confirming the inexplicable nature of the recovery.

The third, a little girl, I will not give her name as her family has requested privacy, who had been born with a significant birthmark covering much of her left cheek.

When her mother held her near the casket, the mother looked down and saw that the mark had disappeared completely.

As though it had never existed.

The family’s pediatrician documented the change and stated that it had no medical explanation.

Three healings, documented, photographed, investigated, submitted, all confirmed as medically inexplicable by the relevant physicians, all incorporated into the beatification file, all belonging to the people they happened to.

And then the church emptied.

The family departed.

The other priests departed.

The sacristan locked the side doors and left me the key to lock the main entrance when I was finished.

And I was alone in Santa Maria Church with the white casket of a 15-year-old boy.

I sat in the front pew.

I do not know how long I sat there.

I’m a practical man.

I have been a parish priest for 41 years.

I manage budgets and schedules and maintenance issues and the endless administrative requirements of a large urban parish.

I am not a man given to extended mystical contemplation, but I sat in that pew and I could not make myself move because the quality of presence I had felt during the mass had not diminished when the people left.

It was still there.

If anything in the empty church, it was stronger.

I looked at the casket, white wood, white roses, the photograph of Carlo that his parents had placed on top, Carlo in his casual clothes smiling that smile.

I thought about the three healings I had documented.

I thought about the 200 people who had come to the church in the three days before the funeral.

I thought about the boy in the third pew who had said that mass was his favorite part of the day because it was when he got to be closest to Jesus.

And then I did something I had not done in perhaps 20 years of priesthood.

I wept.

Not from grief, though grief was present, not from exhaustion, though I was exhausted.

I wept the way you weep when you have spent a very long time being the person who holds other people together and have forgotten that that you are allowed to come apart yourself.

I wept for a boy I had watched grow up in my parish and had not fully appreciated until he was gone.

I wept for the healings I had just documented and the inadequacy of the word inexplicable to describe what I had witnessed.

And then something happened.

I am going to describe it as plainly as I can.

I have a condition in my right hand, essential tremor diagnosed in 2003 that had been progressively worsening over the three years before October 2006.

By that October, the tremor was significant enough to interfere with my ability to hold the chalice steadily during mass.

I had been managing it with medication, but the medication had side effects that affected my energy and concentration.

My neurologist had told me in September that the next step would likely be a more aggressive pharmaceutical intervention.

I had been frightened about this, not for vanity, because the tremor was affecting my ability to do the most sacred part of my ministry.

The elevation of the host, the chalice, the consecration, these are the moments toward which everything else in a priest’s life points and the thought that I might have to step back from them had been weighing on me heavily.

I had not told the congregation.

I had not told most of my colleagues.

I had told God in the particular way that priests tell God things in the privacy of the breviary, in the silence before sleep, in the honest and sometimes desperate conversations that happen when you are alone enough to stop performing
faith and simply practice it.

Sitting in the front pew of the empty church, weeping in a way I had not wept in 20 years, I felt something happen in my right hand.

Not dramatically, not with any light or sound or perceptible external event, a warmth moving through my fingers, through my palm, through the wrist where the tremor originated, and then stillness.

The tremor stopped.

I lifted my right hand and looked at it.

It was completely still.

I have in 41 years elevated the chalice 10,000 times.

That evening, alone in the empty church, I held my right hand in the air and it did not tremble.

It has not trembled since.

My neurologist, Dr.

Amato, examined me in November 2006 and found no evidence of the tremor.

He ordered additional testing.

The testing confirmed complete resolution.

He published nothing.

He said carefully that spontaneous remission of essential tremor was not impossible, but was extremely rare and had no established medical explanation in cases of this severity and duration.

I did not tell him what had happened in the empty church.

I did not tell anyone.

I am telling you now, not because I need to be believed.

I have the medical records.

I have Dr.

Amato’s documentation.

I have 18 years of steady hands elevating the chalice without difficulty.

I am telling you because Carlo Acutis was beatified in 2020 and I stood in the crowd in Rome and watched and thought about a boy in the third pew with a quality of stillness that I had noticed and not fully understood.

About the three miracles I documented.

About the fourth one that happened to me alone in the empty church after everyone had gone.

When there was no one left to witness it except God and a white casket and the silence that, as I have heard others describe from that same church on that same day, was not empty.

It has never been empty since.

I am 67 years old.

My hands are steady.

Every morning when I elevate the host, I think of a boy who sat very still in the third pew and said that this was his favorite moment of the day.

He was right.

It is mine, too.

It always was.

I had just forgotten and he, uh, even after he was gone, reminded me.