I tried to dismantle it with method, repetition, and an almost arrogant stubbornness. But the worst happened: my inner detachment gave way. Looking at the face of the exhumed boy, for the first time in decades of work, I saw more than just matter subject to time. I saw a question staring back at me.
I asked for a break to review my notes alone. When I left, I discovered that the slight tremor in my hands wasn’t due to the coffee. I recalculated, compared tables, and came back to the same conclusions, incompatible with my experience. I was 54 years old, had examined eleven beatification processes, and had never had episodes of metaphysical confusion. The data didn’t dissolve into a convenient explanation; they remained there, like impossible stones on my inner desk.
The Price of Honesty
I went back and completed the procedure because professional habit works even when the world trembles beneath my feet. Each final measurement confirmed that I wasn’t dealing with an isolated anomaly. Before the commission, I didn’t speak of miracles or even mention the word “incorruptibility.” What I did say, however, was far more damaging to my mental stability:
“I must completely rewrite the preliminary report, because the first version no longer seems intellectually honest to me.”
That sentence prompted a heavy silence. It wasn’t a religious triumph, but rather a cautious respect for a process that had become enormously complicated.
That evening, I returned home, and my wife, Juliana, immediately realized something was wrong: I had lost my composure. Over the next few weeks, I rewrote the report several times. I struggled against two opposing temptations: the temptation to suggest more than could be proven, driven by pure fascination, and the temptation to impose weak explanations simply to preserve intact the mental model that had sustained me all my life. In the end, I signed a document far more cautious than the devotees would have liked, and far more disturbing than I myself would have preferred.
A New Man Facing the Limit
The case was filed in Rome with the usual secrecy, and I tried to return to my civilian life as if the Assisi underground didn’t exist. I couldn’t. Something had died inside me that January: my old comfort zone, the arrogant belief that every anomaly would sooner or later conform to my favorite scientific categories.
I learned, through harsh reality, that a hasty denial can be as foolish a superstition as a hasty faith, only disguised by a more refined vocabulary and a more refined tie. The terrifying thing about the Carlo Acutis case wasn’t the encounter with a supernatural spectacle designed to undermine my profession, but the discovery that my profession itself had led me directly to an open door. A door where the numbers didn’t disappear, but they weren’t enough either.
Today I’m still a scientist, I continue to take measurements and sign reports with the same rigor as always. But I do so with humility. I entered that basement a man perfectly sure of who I was and how the world worked. I left with the same qualifications, the same technical precision, and a fresh wound that no formula could fully heal.
It wasn’t I who destroyed my relationship; it was reality that destroyed the man who would have signed it without hesitation.
