My name is Bayata Anus Burksa.

I am 53 years old.

I am Polish and for three years from 1993 to 1996, I was the nanny and caregiver of a little boy named Carlo Acutis in Milan, Italy.

What I am about to tell you today, I have never told anyone publicly.

Not in 28 years.

Not during his beatification in 2020 when the entire world was searching for people who had known him.

Not during the dozens of interviews I was quietly approached to give.

Not even to my own children who know only fragments of what I witnessed.

I kept this secret because I was afraid.

Afraid of not being believed.

Afraid of reducing something sacred to something sensational.

Afraid that the world was not yet ready for the full truth of what that little boy said to me on the evening of May 16th, 1997, the night before his sixth birthday in a garden in Milan.

while he held my rosary in his small hands and looked into my eyes with a certainty that no six-year-old child should possess.

But now, after his canonization in September of 2025, something shifted inside me.

I felt I knew that the time had come, that Carlo himself was asking me to speak.

So today, for the first time, I will tell you everything.

I will tell you about the afternoon I arrived at the Audis home as a 21-year-old girl from a village of 500 people in southern Poland carrying a photograph of the black Madonna of Chensakoa tucked inside my suitcase and a heart full of prayers I had learned before I could read.

I will tell you how I became the first person to speak to Carlo about God.

How I taught him his first prayer in Polish.

How I took him to his first mass.

how I introduced him to the rosary that would become the defining object of his spiritual life.

And I will tell you about the promise, the specific, detailed, almost prophetic promise that a six-year-old boy made to me in a spring garden.

A promise that unfolded across nearly three decades with a precision that defies every rational explanation I have attempted to construct.

A promise involving computers and the Eucharist, the black Madonna of Poland, children learning to pray in a language that was not their own, and a mission that Carlos seemed to understand with absolute clarity long before any adult around him could have guided him toward it.

When I tell you the exact words he used that evening, you will understand why I held them in silence for 28 years.

Because they were not the words of a child.

They were the words of someone who already knew where he was going.

I need you to understand something before I continue.

I am not a mystic.

I am not a visionary.

I am a practical woman, a director at an international creative agency in New York City, a mother, a grandmother.

I have spent my professional life in the world of strategy, communication, and evidence-based decision-making.

I do not say these things lightly.

I do not embellish.

And what I’m about to share with you is not embellishment.

It is memory.

It is documentation.

It is truth.

And it begins in 1993 in an apartment in Milan with a 2-year-old boy who looked at the photograph of our lady of Chanakoa that I had pinned above my bed and smiled as though he recognized her.

I grew up in Croissant Vitz, a village of approximately 500 inhabitants in the Opel province of southern Poland.

If you have never heard of it, that is precisely the point.

It was the kind of place where the church bell was the center of the universe, where the priests knew every family by name and where the rhythm of the lurggical calendar organized everything, planting seasons, celebrations, sorrows, hopes.

My parents were not wealthy.

My father worked in a factory.

My mother kept the home and the garden and the faith.

We did not have much.

But we had something that I have come to understand only in retrospect was extraordinarily rare.

A living tradition of prayer.

Not prayer as obligation, prayer as breath, prayer as the most natural thing a human being could do.

I learned to pray before I learned to read.

My first prayer was the Anel Boji Strojimo, the Polish prayer to the guardian angel that generations of Polish children have learned as their introduction to the spiritual world.

My grandmother taught it to me.

I taught it to my children.

And in 1993 in an apartment on Via Aroto in Milan, I taught it to a little boy named Carlo.

I arrived in Italy in the spring of 1993, 21 years old, with a university scholarship waiting for me in the autumn and a need to earn money before the semester began.

A family connection led me to the Acudis family.

Andrea and Antonia, young Milan professionals with a 2-year-old son who needed consistent, loving care during long working hours.

My Italian was functional but imperfect.

My homesickness was acute.

And yet, from the very first morning I walked into that apartment and found Carlos sitting in his playpen, looking at me with those large serious eyes, something settled inside me.

I cannot explain it any other way.

It simply settled.

He was an extraordinary child from the beginning.

Not in a way that announced itself loudly, not a prodigy in the conventional sense, not precocious in a performative way.

He was extraordinary in his stillness, in his attention.

in the way he listened.

Most 2-year-old children are hurricanes of distraction.

Carlo listened.

When you spoke to him, he absorbed.

When you showed him something, he remembered.

When you introduced him to something beautiful, he treated it with a reverence that seemed to come from somewhere very deep.

My first instinct, as a girl formed entirely within Polish Catholic culture, was to share with him what I knew.

It was not a strategic decision.

It was simply what I had.

And so within the first weeks of my time with the family, I began talking to Carlo about God.

I showed him the small photograph of the black Madonna of Chencoa that I had pinned above my bed.

Our Lady of Chencoa, the Queen of Poland, the icon that had survived invasions and wars and the most brutal chapters of Polish history with her gaze intact and her presence unwavering.

I told Carlo in my broken Italian mixed with Polish words he could not yet understand that this was the most beautiful lady in the world and that she loved him very much.

He stared at the photograph for a long time.

Then he reached out and touched the edge of it with one small finger.

Very gently, as though he understood that it required gentleness.

Bella, he said, beautiful.

That was the beginning.

Over the following weeks and months, I introduced Carlo to the prayers I had grown up with.

The anel Boj first, simple, melodic, a prayer designed for the mouths of children.

Carlo learned it with astonishing speed.

Not just the words, but the rhythm, the intention, the sense of addressing someone real.

By the time he was three, he was saying it every night before bed with what I can only describe as conviction, not performance.

Conviction.

I took him to mass for the first time at the church of Santa Maria Sigrada, a beautiful quiet church not far from the apartment.

I remember the way he sat completely still during the consecration, stiller than most adults I have observed at mass, his eyes fixed on the altar with an intensity that made me catch my breath.

He was 2 and a half years old.

He should have been fidgeting.

He was not fidgeting.

He was watching.

Afterwards, walking home, he held my hand and asked me, “Bayata, is Jesus really there in that little white circle?” I told him, “Yes.

” I told him that Catholics believe that Jesus is truly present, body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Eucharist.

That the host is not a symbol, but a reality.

He walked quietly for a moment, turning this over in his mind with that characteristic thoughtfulness.

Then he said, “So we should go everyday.

” He was not yet three years old.

I introduced the rosary during his third year.

I had a simple wooden rosary that had belonged to my grandmother, worn smooth at the beads from decades of prayer, and I showed Carlo how to hold it, how to move from bead to bead, how each decade was a meditation on a mystery of the faith.

He was fascinated

by it, not by the object itself, though he seemed to appreciate the tactile dimension of prayer in a way that many adults never discover.

He was fascinated by the idea that you could count your way through something sacred, that there was a structure to it, an architecture.

It’s like a program, he told me once when he was about four.

I did not understand what he meant at the time.

Later, when I learned of his passion for computing, I would remember that sentence and feel something very cold and very clear move through me.

In 1996, I married Toadus, a Polish man I had met in Milan through our church community, and the time came for me to leave the Acudis household.

I had been with the family for 3 years.

Carlo was 5 years old.

The farewell was difficult, more difficult than I had anticipated.

Carlo cried.

Not the crying of a child deprived of something convenient, but the crying of a child losing something essential.

He held my hand at the door and would not let go for a long time.

Antonia stood to the side, visibly moved, giving us space.

“You will come back to visit?” he asked.

“Of course,” as I told him.

“Always.

” “Promise?” “I promise.

” He considered this then.

“Bayata, can I keep something of yours? something to remember that you came back to visit.

I looked down at my grandmother’s rosary which I had been holding.

I often carried it in my hand during transitions, difficult moments, goodbyes.

I placed it in his palm.

Keep this one for now.

I will bring you another from Poland.

But this one, this one is for you to borrow until I come back.

He looked at the rosary with those serious eyes.

Then he looked at me.

I will keep it forever, he said.

He was 5 years old and he meant it with complete sincerity.

True to my word, I continued visiting the family regularly.

Carlo and my son Conrad played together.

The connection between our families continued to breathe.

And it was during one of these visits on May 16th, 1997 that everything I have carried for 28 years took place.

And if this channel has been an answer for you, consider leaving a super thanks.

This financial help, however small it may seem, sustains this mission and allows us to continue bringing deep and transformative content to more lives that need this word.

May 16th, 1997, the day before Carlo’s 6th birthday, I had traveled from our apartment across the city to deliver a birthday gift.

a small wooden crucifix I had brought back from a recent pilgrimage to Chensakoa.

It was not elaborate.

It was simply beautiful and it had been blessed at the feet of the black Madonna.

And I wanted Carlo to have it.

The afternoon was warm, the kind of warm that Milan produces in late spring when the light comes in at a specific angle and makes everything look slightly more significant than it is.

Carlo was in the garden behind the house.

the Giardino Pagano, a small green space where we had spent countless afternoons during my years as his nanny.

I used to take off his shoes so he could walk barefoot on the damp grass.

I had told him that God made the grass wet in the morning as a gift, so that children could feel something real under their feet.

He was playing alone when I arrived.

He looked up the moment he heard the gate, and the expression that crossed his face was one I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

Pure, uncomplicated joy.

He ran across the grass toward me with his arms open and I lifted him and held him and for a moment neither of us said anything.

We sat on the old bench near the far wall, the bench where we had spent many afternoons talking about prayers, about the saints, about the mysteries of the rosary.

He settled beside me comfortably with the ease of a child who has never needed to perform comfort, who simply has it.

I gave him the crucifix.

He held it in both hands, turning it over carefully, examining the grain of the wood, the line of the figure upon it.

Then he pressed it to his chest briefly with closed eyes in what I can only describe as a gesture of reception, as though he were accepting not just an object, but a transmission.

It’s from Chencoa, I told him.

From our lady.

He nodded as though this required no elaboration.

Then he looked at me.

Bayata, he said, I need to make you a promise today.

Something in his voice, the precision of it, the deliberateness, made me set aside whatever casual response I might have given.

I looked at him properly.

He was sitting very straight.

His hands were folded in his lap, holding the crucifix and the rosary together.

His eyes were on me with that intensity that had always distinguished him from other children, but that now seemed intensified to a degree I’d not seen before.

What kind of promise, my dear Carlo? He took a breath and then he spoke with the specificity and calm of someone recounting something that had already happened, not something he was proposing.

Bata, he said, Jesus asked me to tell you something.

He asked me to make you a promise today because you need to know what is coming so that when it happens, you won’t be afraid and you won’t be surprised.

I felt very still.

The garden felt very still.

The afternoon light seemed to intensify.

“What is coming, Carlo?” “My mission,” he said simply.

“Jesus showed me my mission.

It’s going to happen through computers.

I am going to use computers to talk about him in the Eucharist.

To show people all the places in the world where he has left proof of himself in the host, in the bread, in the miracle, like a map, like a catalog, like a library that everyone in the world can visit without getting on a plane.

He paused as though checking that I was following him.

I was following him.

I was barely breathing.

He showed me this in a dream.

Carlo continued.

And in the dream, I understood that the reason I know how to do this, the reason computers make sense to me in a way they don’t make sense to other children.

It’s because you taught me the first thing.

You taught me the prayer.

You brought me the Madonna.

You took me to mass the first time.

You showed me where to look.

He touched the rosary.

Everything starts from where you planted it, Bata.

The computers are just a different rosary.

A rosary that everyone in the world can use at the same time.

I had tears in my eyes.

I did not trust myself to speak.

But that’s not the whole promise.

Carlo said he was completely composed.

He might have been 6 years old, but in that moment, I was not speaking to a six-year-old.

I’m not sure I can explain what I mean by that without sounding unhinged.

I only know what I experienced.

The promise has three parts, he continued.

The first part is the computers and the Eucharist that I already told you.

The second part is Poland.

I promised our lady of Chenstakcoa that I would come to visit her and thank her for sending you to me, for making you my first teacher.

Carlo, I began.

I know it might be hard, he said.

And he seemed to understand something he did not explain.

But she showed me that even if I can’t go in the way I’m planning, I will still go.

She showed me that the visit will happen.

And when you are in Chensakoa one day and something happens that you don’t expect, something that tells you Carlo has been here, I I want you to remember this moment and know it is me keeping my promise.

The third part of the promise, he told me, involved children, specifically children who would learn to pray the Anella Boji through him, through his story, through the chain that had begun with my grandmother teaching me and me teaching him and whatever came after.

The prayer will travel, he said, like a signal.

You know how radio signals travel? You can’t see them, but they go everywhere through walls, through countries, through the sky.

The prayer is like that.

You sent it to me and I will send it further and it will keep going after both of us are gone.

He held out the rosary to me.

Then my grandmother’s rosary, the one I had left with him at my farewell.

I am giving this back to you now, he said, because the promise is made and the prayer is already traveling.

You should have it, but I want you to carry it with you when everything I told you comes true.

So, you have something to hold.

I took the rosary with shaking hands.

I do not know if I managed to form coherent words.

I think I said something about how extraordinary he was.

I think I told him I loved him.

He hugged me the way he always did, without restraint, fully, the way only very young children and very holy people embrace.

And then Antonia called him inside for dinner.

I sat on that bench for a long time after he had gone.

I sat there trying to understand what had just happened, trying to organize it into something my 26-year-old mind could process.

I was not unfamiliar with accounts of mystical experience.

I’d grown up with the spirituality of St.

Fina, of the apparitions of Fatima, of the long tradition of Polish Catholic mysticism.

But those things had always been distant, historical, mediated through books and sermons.

This was a six-year-old boy in a garden in Milan with grass stains on his knees making me a promise in three parts.

I told no one, not Tadas.

Not my mother when I called her in Poland that week.

Not Antonia, who was one of my closest friends.

I kept it the way you keep something that feels too large for ordinary conversation.

Not out of shame, but out of a kind of reverence, as though speaking it carelessly would diminish it somehow.

reduce it to an anecdote when it was something else entirely.

In the years that followed, I watched Carlo from a careful distance.

We continued to see the family.

I watched him develop his passion for computing with a pace and intensity that seemed to have no natural explanation for a child his age.

I watched him begin around the age of 11 and 12 to develop what would become his most significant contribution.

The website and exhibition cataloging eucharistic miracles from around the world.

Precisely what he had described to me in the garden.

A library that everyone in the world can visit, a rosary made of pixels.

I watched him attend mass daily, beginning the eucharistic devotion that would define his brief life.

I watched him pray the rosary, including Antonia told me on more than one occasion, the anel boji, which he had never forgotten, which he still said in Polish exactly as I had taught him.

I watched him grow into a teenager who wore sneakers and played video games and talked about soccer and was by every account a completely normal, joyful, deeply relatable young man while simultaneously living an interior life of extraordinary depth that most adults never approach.

And then in October of 2006, he was gone.

Continue reading….
Next »