I went to Aisi to destroy a dead boy’s reputation.

I want to say that plainly without softening it because the plainness is part of the story.

I did not go as a curious skeptic.

I did not go as an open-minded investigator willing to follow the evidence wherever it led.

I went with a specific objective, a prepared methodology, 3 months of research, and 32 years of practice in finding the natural explanation for every supernatural claim I had ever encountered.

I went to Aisi on October 3rd, 2024 to document the fraud surrounding Carlo Acutis and produce the definitive investigation that would protect the members of my congregation from what I considered a particularly dangerous religious deception.

I came home unable to speak.

Not metaphorically, not in the sense of being stunned into silence by an argument I could not counter.

I mean that for 3 days after my visit to Carlos tomb, I was physically incapable of producing speech.

My throat worked, my lungs worked, my vocal cords did not.

The sound that I had used for 32 years to dismantle religious claims simply was not there.

I had time during those three days to think about what had happened.

By the time my voice returned, I was a different man than the one who had walked into that sanctuary on the morning of October 4th.

This is the story of how a professional religious skeptic went to debunk a saint and was converted instead.

My name is Marcus David Thompson.

I am 47 years old and I have spent my entire adult life in the service of a truth I was completely certain of.

That certainty is important to understand before anything else because what happened to me in a Cisi cannot be properly weighed without understanding the mass of what it overturned.

I became a Jehovah’s Witness at 15.

The same year I developed my first serious interest in logic and systematic argument.

The fit was not accidental.

The organization I joined required serious intellectual engagement.

Its apologetics, particularly its engagement with other Christian traditions, involved careful handling of historical evidence, Greek and Hebrew textual analysis and the construction of arguments from primary sources.

I was good at this.

I was very good at this.

By my early 20s, I had developed a specialization, not the door-to-door outreach that most people associate with Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I did that, too.

But apologetic investigation, specifically the investigation and reputation of claimed Catholic miracles.

I was drawn to this work for reasons that I understand more clearly now than I did then.

It combined everything I was good at.

Research, systematic analysis, the careful assessment of evidence, the identification of the place where a chain of reasoning fails.

I was in professional terms the person you called when a congregation was being troubled by interest in a particular claimed miracle or saint and you needed someone to go in and demonstrate with evidence why the claim did not hold.

I was thorough.

I was within the framework I was operating in honest.

I did not fabricate evidence or misrepresent sources in ways I was aware of.

I genuinely believed that the methodology I was applying was sound and that the conclusions I reached were accurate.

In 28 years of active investigation, I had never encountered a claimed Catholic miracle that in my assessment survived rigorous examination.

Lord is cures I had attributed to misdiagnosis and spontaneous remission.

Fatima I had explained through documented meteorological phenomena and the psychology of crowd expectation.

I had investigated dozens of individual cases, alleged healings, incorruptible bodies, apparitions and had reached the same conclusion each time.

The natural explanation was available.

The supernatural claim was unsupported and the persistence of belief was a function of emotional investment rather than evidence.

I was within the world I inhabited successful and credentialed.

I was also, as I now understand, operating inside a framework so closed that certain kinds of evidence could not enter it.

Not because I was dishonest, but because I had systematically trained myself to recognize and dismiss the kinds of evidence that my conclusions required me to dismiss.

This is the person who arrived in a Cisi with his cameras and his recording equipment and his 32 years of practiced certainty.

I had spent 3 months preparing the Carlo Autoutis investigation.

I want to describe this preparation in some detail because I think it matters to understand how thorough I was and therefore how thoroughly I was overturned.

My interest in Carlo had been prompted by leadership within my congregation.

Several members, younger people primarily had been encountering his story online and expressing what was described to me as dangerous fascination.

They were asking questions about his eukaristic miracle catalog, about the documented case of the Brazilian boy whose healing had been accepted as the miracle required for beatatification, about the quality of his personal faith as described by people who had known him.

The questions were not hostile.

They were curious and curiosity in our context was something to be addressed with information.

I was asked to produce the investigation that would answer the questions definitively.

Carlo Autoutis had been born on May 3rd, 1991 in London.

He had grown up in Milan.

He had died on October the 12th, 2006 at 15 years old of fulminant leukemia.

He had been beatified in a Cisi on October 10th, 2020 and was in the process of canonization.

He had been passionate about computers and had built a documented catalog of eukaristic miracles.

He had attended daily mass and was described by everyone who knew him as genuinely consistently joyful.

I began with the biographical material and looked as I always did for the inconsistencies that accumulate around hiography.

Accounts of holy people tend to flatten over time.

The contradictions and the difficult moments are smoothed away.

The virtues become exaggerated.

The person becomes a type rather than an individual.

This flattening is not necessarily deliberate deception.

It is a natural consequence of memories tendency to preserve what confirms what we want to believe.

With Carlo, I found something unexpected in the biographical material.

a consistency that was itself suspicious to my trained eye, because it suggested not the natural flattening of haggio, but something closer to a person who was actually genuinely coherent.

The accounts from people who had known him, classmates, neighbors, family, friends, priests, did not describe a saint in the conventional sense.

They described a teenager who wore sneakers and played video games and laughed loudly and was also without contradiction or effort deeply and consistently oriented toward God and toward the people around him.

I noted this as a potential vulnerability in my investigation.

Accounts that are too consistent can be the result of coordinated narrative management.

I planned to interview people directly and look for the cracks that coordinated narratives always contain.

I then moved to the miracles.

The formal canonical miracle was the healing of a young Brazilian boy, Matos Pio Alves Nasimento, who had been born with a congenital malf for the pancreatic annula and had been inexplicably healed after his parents prayed at Carlos tomb.

I obtained the medical documentation that had been submitted in the canonical process and reviewed it with the same methodology I had applied to Lord’s cases.

What I found was more carefully documented than I had expected.

The prehealing diagnosis was clear.

The posaling status was clear.

The interval was short.

The medical personnel involved had not been catholically motivated in their initial assessments.

There was no obvious mechanism by which the improvement could have been explained through delayed effect of prior treatment.

I noted this as a more difficult case than usual.

Not impossible to explain, I maintained that position, but requiring more careful argumentation than the typical Lord’s case.

I planned to address this directly in a CCI where I expected to find the kinds of commercial and organizational pressure that in my experience created the incentive structures that sustained false claims.

I expected vendors.

I expected emotional manipulation.

I expected the apparatus of institutional religion operating to protect its investment in a particular story.

I packed my equipment and flew to Italy.

A CC is not what I expected.

I had been to religious sites before in the course of other investigations, and what I had found in most of them was the specific quality of places that have been developed for religious tourism, the gentle, pervasive pressure toward devotion, the architecture of the commercially sacred, the management of atmosphere for emotional effect.

Aizi had some of this.

There are vendors, there are tour groups, there is the ordinary infrastructure of a place that receives many visitors.

But there was also something else that I registered on my first afternoon and found difficult to categorize.

A quality of the place itself, not manufactured, not managed, that operated beneath the surface of the tourist infrastructure the way a river operates beneath ice.

present, moving, unaffected by what was on top of it.

I attributed this to my own state of mind.

I was, despite my preparation, not entirely at ease.

32 years of apologetic work had not made me indifferent to the places I investigated.

It had made me vigilant, which is a different relationship to unease.

I was watchful for exactly the kind of atmospheric manipulation that produces the sensation I was experiencing.

I visited the sanctuary of the stripping on my first afternoon.

Carlos’s body is there beneath a simple altar.

The sanctuary itself is modest.

Not the baroque elaboration of older Catholic sites, but something more contemporary in its simplicity.

The tomb is accessible, close, the glass visible to anyone who approaches.

I photographed the space systematically.

I noted the positions of the visitors.

I observed the behavioral patterns, the kneeling, the weeping, the hands placed against the glass, and I classified them within the framework I had always used.

evidence of the psychological power of the location, the crowd dynamics of collective devotion, the self-reinforcing emotional experience of pilgrimage.

I went back to my hotel and reviewed my photographs.

The space looked in the photographs exactly as I had expected, a religious site carefully maintained with the visual vocabulary of Catholic devotion deployed effectively to produce the desired experience in visitors.

I planned my return for the following morning.

Before I tell you what happened on the morning of October 4th, if you are someone who has built a structure of certainty about something important and have sensed at the edges of it the possibility that the structure might not hold, this story is for you not as a cautionary tale, as testimony from someone who found out what certainty actually costs when the thing it is certain written about is wrong.

And if you want to spend time with the young man whose tomb silenced a professional skeptic, 7 days with Carlo is in the description below.

7 days of his practices, including his approach to the Eucharistic miracles that he documented with the same empirical rigor I applied in trying to refute them.

He and I were, I have since understood, doing the same kind of work toward opposite conclusions.

It will be there when this ends.

Now, October 4th, 2024, 10 in the morning, the sanctuary of the stripping.

I arrived at the sanctuary at 9:30, earlier than the previous day before the crowd had fully assembled.

I wanted the space with fewer people in it, cleaner conditions for observation, less contamination from the social dynamics of collective devotion.

I set up my recording equipment at the edge of the space and began systematic documentation, photographs, video of visitor behavior, audio notes of my observations as I moved through the sanctuary.

I was, [snorts] I will say this plainly, professional.

I was doing what I had been trained to do and what I had done many times before.

I moved toward the tomb.

What I am about to describe is difficult to convey with the precision that the experience deserves.

I am someone who defaults to precision, who is uncomfortable with language that cannot be verified or whose reference cannot be clearly specified.

What happened to me at Carlos tomb does not submit easily to precise language.

And I want to be honest about this rather than forcing it into a clarity it does not have.

I was standing approximately 3 ft from the glass of the tomb.

I had my camera raised.

I was composing a photograph that would document the setup of the space, the altar, the glass, the position of the tomb in relation to the surrounding architecture.

And then something changed.

Not in the room, not in the light or the temperature or the behavior of the other visitors.

something changed in the quality of my awareness.

The only analogy I have for it and I recognize the inadequacy of the analogy is the change that occurs when you have been looking at an image that can be seen two ways and your perception shifts from one interpretation to the other.

Something that was not visible before becomes visible.

Not because the image has changed, because the way you are seeing it has changed.

What I became aware of was a presence.

I am aware of how this sounds.

I am aware that I spent 32 years dismissing exactly this kind of claim.

I am also aware that I am reporting what I experienced as accurately as I can.

And what I experienced was a presence, not an emotion, not an atmospheric effect, not the projection of my own psychological state onto neutral circumstances.

A presence, the specific irreducible awareness of another intelligence, conscious and attentive, in the space where I was standing.

And simultaneously, my voice was gone.

I did not immediately understand that I could not speak.

The realization came when I tried to record an audio note and found that no sound came out.

I tried again.

Nothing.

I tried to clear my throat.

Nothing.

I am not someone who panics.

I assessed the situation methodically.

No pain, no obstruction sensation, no difficulty breathing.

The voice mechanism had simply stopped functioning.

I noted this without the panic that would have been available and I remained where I was.

I remained where I was for 3 hours.

I want to be careful about what I say next because I am reporting experiences that I cannot fully verify and that I am aware are for a person with my background the most significant claims I have ever made.

During those three hours, I received what I can only describe as a systematic dismantling of the framework I had built over 32 years.

Not through argument.

I had been in arguments.

I had won arguments.

Arguments were something I knew how to navigate.

And navigating them involves maintaining the structure of your position while addressing the specific challenge at hand.

What happened at Carlo’s tomb was not argument.

It was the thing that makes argument possible.

The underlying orientation toward truth that is prior to any specific position redirecting itself.

I had been wrong about miracles, not about the methodology for investigating them.

The methodology was sound as far as it went, but about the prior conclusion that shaped the investigation.

that all claimed contemporary miracles were fraudulent or misunderstood.

This was not a finding I had arrived at.

It was an axiom I had brought with me to every investigation and every investigation had confirmed it because I had not designed my investigations to be capable of finding otherwise.

This realization was devastating in the specific way that a structural discovery is devastating.

A hairline crack in the foundation does not topple a building immediately.

But once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it and you begin to understand that everything built on the foundation is implicated in the crack.

I thought about 28 years of investigations, each one carefully conducted, each one reaching the same conclusion.

Had any of them genuinely been designed to find the evidence against my prior conclusion? Had I ever set up an investigation in which my methodology was capable of confirming supernatural causation rather than only capable of confirming natural causation? I had not.

I am an honest man.

I have been in important ways an honest man my entire life.

The dishonesty I was confronting was not the conscious deliberate kind.

It was the dishonesty of a man who had confused rigor with confirmation, who had built a system that felt scientific but was structured to protect a conclusion from the evidence that could challenge it.

Carlo had been investigating miracles, too.

His catalog, the one he built with his best friend, the one that has traveled to dozens of countries, was designed to let the evidence speak.

He did not begin with the conclusion that the eucharistic miracles were genuine and arrange evidence in their support.

He assembled the documentation and let it accumulate toward whatever conclusion it reached.

I had studied his methodology as part of my preparation for this trip, intending to find its flaws.

What I had found, without acknowledging it at the time, was that his methodology was more rigorous than mine.

A 15-year-old boy had built a better investigation than I had.

Standing at his tomb for 3 hours unable to speak, I arrived at several things that I want to describe as carefully as I can.

The first was about holiness.

I had spent 32 years treating holiness as a category that no longer had contemporary instantiation.

The apostolic age had ended.

The gifts had ceased.

and what contemporary religious communities called holiness was a combination of moral virtue, psychological health, and social conditioning.

I had not considered that I might be wrong about this because I had never encountered what would have changed my mind.

What I was aware of at Carlo’s tomb was not moral virtue or psychological health or social conditioning.

It was something of a different order.

The specific quality of a place where genuine holiness has been genuinely present, not manufactured, not performed.

The real thing residual in the stone and the glass and the air in the way that music is residual in a concert hall, not present in the same form, but unmistakably the echo of something that was there.

Carlo had been genuinely holy, not in the sense of being unusually virtuous, though he was that, in the sense of being actually oriented toward God in a way that most people are not.

That produces an actual quality in a life and in the places that life inhabits that leaves something real behind.

The second was about my methodologies fundamental problem.

I had designed my investigations to find natural explanations.

This is not in itself wrong.

Good investigation should exhaust natural explanations before concluding that supernatural ones are required.

But I had built into my methodology a closed loop.

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