I have wept in public exactly once in my adult life.

Once in 59 years, not at my father’s funeral where I stood with the composed dignity that Italian men of my generation were trained to maintain.

Not when my marriage ended, which it did quietly and without drama.

Not during the years of intellectual crisis that preceded my entrance into the Masonic Lodge at 25, when I was in genuine anguish about questions I did not yet have language for.

Once on the morning of May 3rd, 2024, in the sanctuary of the stripping in Aisi, in front of the tomb of a 15-year-old boy I had come to discredit.

I wept for three hours uncontrollably publicly in front of pilgrims from a dozen countries in front of six fellow Masons who had come with me on what we had called our enlightenment mission in front of people who could not have imagined and I could not have predicted that a man holding 32 degrees of the Scottish right a venerable master of the lodge of the light of the east in Rome a published author on the subject of Catholic psychological manipulation that this man would arrive at a teenage saint’s tomb and be broken into pieces by whatever lived there.

I had spent 34 years building a structure of rational certainty, specifically designed to make this impossible.

It took 3 hours to come apart.

This is the story of how the thing I was most protected against reached me anyway.

My name is Giovani Benedetto Rossini.

I am 59 years old.

I am a Roman, which is a specific kind of Italian shaped by a city that is simultaneously the capital of Western Christianity and one of its most sophisticated critics, where the church’s presence is so total and so ancient that a certain kind of intellectual reaction against it is almost inevitable.

the way certain plants grow only in the shade of very large trees.

I was raised Catholic, baptized, confirmed, educated in Catholic schools, mass attending until my mid20s.

My relationship with the faith of my childhood was not hostile.

It was distant.

The church I knew as a young man seemed to me large and ancient and institutional in a way that had nothing to do with the questions I was actually asking.

I wanted to understand reality.

The parish offered repetition.

I came to Freemasonry at 25 through a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome who recognized in me what he called the Masonic temperament, a commitment to rational inquiry, a dissatisfaction with answers that required suspension of critical thought, a belief that human reason properly applied could illuminate everything that needed illuminating.

He was not wrong about any of these things.

What he did not tell me and what I did not discover until 34 years later was that these qualities in me were covering something else.

The lodge gave me what the church had not given me.

rigorous intellectual community, philosophical depth, a framework for understanding reality that required evidence rather than faith, and a sense of purpose in the specific project of what we called enlightened rationalism.

The systematic demonstration that human reason was sufficient for human flourishing and that supernatural claims of any kind were obstacles rather than aids to genuine understanding.

I rose through the degrees with what my Masonic brothers described as unusual speed, driven partly by genuine intellectual capacity, and partly by a quality of commitment that I understood then as conviction and understand now as hunger.

I was looking for something in the lodge that the lodge could provide partially but not completely.

and I kept moving forward hoping to find it in the next degree, the next initiation, the next level of revealed understanding.

By the time I reached the 32nd degree of the ancient and accepted Scottish right, I had published three papers in Masonic journals on the subject of Catholic psychological manipulation, had developed and delivered training programs for new lodge initiates on the mechanisms of religious fraud, and had established a reputation within the international Masonic community as someone who could be called upon when a lodge was dealing with what we called Catholic influence.

when members or their families were being drawn toward the church through what we considered emotional manipulation rather than rational persuasion.

Carlo Acutis was born on May 3rd, 1991 in London.

He grew up in Milan.

He attended mass every day, built an online exhibition of Eucharistic miracles, wore sneakers, and played video games, and had a quality of joyful presence that everyone who knew him describes in terms that are difficult to categorize as anything except genuine.

He died on October 12th, 2006 at 15 years old of a leukemia that moved through him in 9 days.

He was beatified in a Cisc October 10th, 2020.

He was the person I had come to destroy.

I want to describe what concerned us about Carlo Acutis in the years before May 2024 because the concern was genuine and the analysis behind it was not stupid.

It was wrong but it was not stupid and the distinction matters for understanding what happened.

What concerned us was the demographic.

The traditional Catholic appeal to supernatural claims had always been most effective with populations we considered epistemically vulnerable.

The uneducated, the elderly, the recently bererieved, people in conditions of heightened emotional need who were less equipped to critically evaluate claims presented to them in a religious context.

Our lodg’s intervention strategy had been built around educating these populations toward rational assessment of supernatural claims.

Carlo Acutis was attracting none of these populations primarily.

He was attracting young people, digital natives, technically sophisticated, the exact demographic that our training predicted would be most resistant to traditional religious manipulation.

He was doing it through a combination of elements that our analysis identified as a sophisticated evolution of Catholic marketing.

The teenage saint narrative that made holiness seem relatable and contemporary.

The technological expertise that gave him credibility with a generation for whom technology is a primary language.

The social media presence that continued growing postuously in ways that suggested significant institutional management.

We analyzed this as a coordinated campaign, not fraudulent necessarily.

We did not assume bad faith in everyone involved, but designed, managed, a church institution recognizing a demographic opportunity and developing an asset to address it.

Our enlightenment mission was organized to document this, to trace the institutional mechanisms behind the Carlo Acutis phenomenon, to identify the financial flows that sustained the pilgrimage infrastructure, to interview witnesses whose miraculous claims we expected to find inconsistent under examination, and to produce a comprehensive analysis that would provide our lodge and its allied organizations with the tools to counter this new form of Catholic influence among younger populations.

Six of us traveled to Aizi on May the 2nd.

We were wellprepared.

Three of us had medical training of some kind.

Two had backgrounds in psychology.

I had 34 years of experience in exactly this kind of investigation.

We had recording equipment, interview protocols, a research framework developed over several months.

On the evening of our arrival, I walked through the streets of Aizi and noted what I expected to find.

the tourist infrastructure of a heavily visited religious site, the vendors, the organized groups of pilgrims, the architecture of a place that had been managed for centuries to produce a specific kind of experience in visitors.

I noted it all with the practiced eye of someone who had visited religious sites before and knew what to look for.

There was one thing I noted and did not know what to do with a quality in the streets of Aisi at evening in the light in the particular silence of a hilltown at the end of a warm day that did not fit my analytical categories not manufactured not managed something older than any management.

I filed it.

I moved on.

We arrived at the sanctuary at 9:15.

My colleagues position themselves at various points around the space to observe visitor behavior and begin preliminary documentation.

I moved toward the tomb with my recorder, intending to gather material for the portion of our analysis that would address the atmospheric management of the space.

The way lighting, architecture, and crowd dynamics combined to produce the devotional experience pilgrims described.

I want to tell you something about what I was doing as I approached the tomb because it is relevant to what happened next.

I was performing an act of will, not analysis.

Will.

The analysis was the cover story I told myself, but underneath it was something I recognized clearly now and recognized barely at all.

Then I was using the analysis to hold something at a distance to keep it from getting too close.

The holiness, I am going to use this word though I am aware of its difficulties.

The holiness that was present in that space, not manufactured, not managed, not the product of the tourism infrastructure or the institutional church’s carefully maintained narrative.

I was aware of it from the moment I entered, and I was working hard not to be.

34 years of masonic formation had given me sophisticated tools for not being affected by religious environments.

I knew the mechanisms.

I knew how atmosphere produces emotional states.

How emotional states produce experiences that feel transcendent but are explicable in naturalistic terms.

How the combination of expectation and suggestive environment creates the conditions for what religious people describe as spiritual experience.

I had explained these mechanisms to hundreds of people over three decades.

I knew the explanation and standing 3 ft from Carlo’s tomb at 9:30 in the morning on the anniversary of his birth, I could not make the explanation work.

Before I tell you what happened, if you have ever used intellectual rigor as a shield rather than a tool, if you have ever been more committed to an explanation than to the truth, the explanation was supposed to account for.

I want you to know that what happened to me in that sanctuary is available to anyone who is willing to stop holding it at a distance.

Carlo does not require your agreement.

He does not require your prior belief.

He requires only proximity.

And if you want to understand this young man better, the one who was born on the morning I was standing at his tomb, whose life is the most complete argument I have ever encountered for the compatibility of rational intelligence and genuine faith.

Seven days with Carlo is in the description below.

seven days of his practices, his prayer, his way of inhabiting each ordinary day as if it were sacred ground.

It will be there when this ends.

Now, 9:30 in the morning, the tomb.

The moment I could not make the explanation work, I’m going to describe this as accurately as I can, which means acknowledging that the description will be imperfect.

The first thing I felt was grief.

Not sadness.

Grief.

The specific bone deep grief that belongs to irreversible loss to the permanent absence of something that should have been present.

I had not known Carlo Acutis.

I had no personal relationship with him, no prior encounter, no basis in ordinary experience for grieving his absence.

And yet standing at his tomb, what moved through me was the grief of someone who has lost something central to their life.

I tried reflexively to analyze this transference from unprocessed personal losses, the architectural and atmospheric design of the space producing emotional vulnerability, the particular quality of grief that pilgrimage sites are engineered to provoke.

I had the explanations available.

They did not work.

The grief was specific, not generic spiritual emotion, but the grief of someone who has recognized too late something they should not have missed.

The second thing I felt was shame.

This one I could trace.

I was standing at the tomb of a 15-year-old boy who had spent his short life documenting evidence of the supernatural with the rigor and honesty of a genuine empiricist, the qualities I considered the highest of intellectual virtues.

And I had come to destroy his legacy.

The shame was not produced by the atmosphere.

It was produced by the accurate perception of what I was doing.

The third thing, and this is the one I have the most difficulty describing, was the awareness of what Carlo’s life actually contained.

I cannot tell you how I received this.

I know how it sounds.

I know the explanations that are available for unexpected interior states in emotionally charged environments.

I am telling you what I experienced, not asking you to accept a particular explanation for it.

What I became aware of was the quality of Carlo’s life.

Not the biography, not the facts I had researched, but the actual interior quality of it.

The daily mass, not as religious observance, but as genuine encounter with something he found real and nourishing and essential.

The miracle catalog, not as apologetic exercise, but as honest inquiry, the work of someone who actually wanted to know what the evidence showed.

The joy that everyone who knew him describes, the specific joy of someone who has found what they were looking for and is giving the best of themselves to it every day.

And in the awareness of this, the simultaneous awareness of my own life.

34 years of intellectual achievement in service of a conclusion I had never genuinely tested.

Three decades of sophisticated argumentation on behalf of a position I had never honestly examined.

A philosophical system that called itself enlightened rationalism and was in the specific form I had inhabited it the most elaborate defense mechanism I had ever encountered.

Elaborate enough that I had never seen it as a defense mechanism at all.

I had been hungry for something my entire adult life.

The lodge had fed me partially to be the community, the intellectual engagement, the sense of purpose, but the hunger underneath those things, the specific hunger that had driven me through 25 years of Catholicism and into Freemasonry and through 34 years of rising through its degrees.

That hunger had never been addressed.

Carlo’s life had addressed it, not through argument, through example.

The tears began at some point during these realizations and did not stop.

I was aware peripherilally of my colleagues watching me.

I was aware of the pilgrims around me, of the activity of the sanctuary continuing, of the ordinary functioning of the space that did not stop because one man was coming apart in front of Carlo’s tomb.

I was aware that what I was doing was by the standards of the community I belonged to incomprehensible and possibly unforgivable.

That a 32nd degree Mason, a venerable master, a man who had built his professional identity on emotional detachment from religious phenomena, was weeping publicly and uncontrollably at a Catholic saint’s tomb.

I was not able to stop.

I want to tell you something about what it is like to weep in a way you cannot control for 3 hours because I think it is not what most people imagine.

It is not a release.

It is not the cathartic emotion of someone finally expressing something they had been holding back.

It is more like a correction.

Was the body and the deeper mind correcting a position that the conscious defended mind had maintained against their continuous objection.

For 3 hours everything I had spent 34 years constructing was being corrected from the inside.

The arguments, the framework, the sophisticated apologetics of enlightened rationalism.

I could still access all of it.

could still follow the logical structure of every position I had held and none of it had any weight.

The weight was elsewhere.

The weight was in what I was experiencing, which was simply what was actually there.

Carlo Acutis had been holy, not in a category that required supernatural explanation before you could perceive it in the direct immediate prior to explanation sense in which some things are simply true before you have a framework for them.

He had been genuinely specifically completely holy and the holiness had been of the kind that does not end when the body does.

I had spent decades arguing that this category did not exist.

I was standing inside the evidence that it did.

My colleague Marco, the one who had recruited me into the lodge 30 years ago, who had introduced me to the concept of enlightened rationalism as the framework for my intellectual life, came and stood beside me at some point in the second hour.

I was aware of him the way you are aware of someone standing beside you when you’re in the middle of something much larger than the social situation peripherally without the capacity to engage with their presence.

He put his hand on my shoulder.

He said something I could not hear clearly.

Then he stood with me without speaking and I understood from this that whatever he had expected from our mission to Aizi what was happening to his colleague was outside his available categories too.

In the third hour the grief shifted.

The grief of loss of not having known Carlo of having spent decades fighting against what he represented was still there.

But something moved through it or beneath it that I can only describe as the specific quality of a door opening.

Not the comfortable door of confirmation, but some the uncomfortable door of real encounter with something that is not yourself, that is not what you expected, that is not available in the categories you brought.

I was not having a breakdown.

I was having an encounter.

The distinction matters because breakdowns are about the self.

The self under pressure.

The self in crisis, the self being overwhelmed by circumstances it cannot handle.

What was happening to me was not primarily about me.

It was about what was present in that space, in that tomb, in the residual reality of a life that had been entirely and completely given.

I had brought 34 years of intellectual apparatus to protect me from this.

It was insufficient.

I left the sanctuary at approximately 1:00 in the afternoon.

My colleagues were waiting in the patza.

None of them said anything immediately.

They had the specific silence of people who have witnessed something they do not have language for and are waiting for someone else to provide it.

I did not provide it.

I sat at a table in the piaza and ordered coffee.

I did not drink and looked at the hilltown of Aisi and tried to locate the position I had occupied that morning and found that I could not get back to it.

Not because it had been destroyed.

I could still follow the argument, still access the framework, still construct the case I had come to Aisi to make.

The framework was intact.

I simply could not inhabit it anymore.

It was like a house that is structurally sound but that you cannot live in because something fundamental has changed about your relationship to it.

Marco sat across from me eventually and said Giovanni what happened.

I said I don’t know yet.

This was true.

I did not know yet.

What I knew was the shape of what had changed without yet having language for the content of the change.

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