A statue of Blessed Carlo Acutis was unveiled in the province of Laguna, south of Manila, on October 10, the day of his beatification.
The image was sculpted by Felman Limlengco Bagalso of the town of Paete, in Laguna province.
Nenett Bagalso, wife of the sculptor, said her husband started working on the three-foot wooden image in February after the announcement of the schedule of Acutis’ beatification.
A seminarian from Tarlac who is studying in Italy reportedly requested the sculptor to do the image.
Work on the image was guided by the Association of the Friends of Carlo Acutis in Italy and the mother of the Blessed teen.
A priest from the province of Batanes has also asked the sculptor for two images of Acutis, said Bagalso.
Acutis, a young computer programmer who died of leukemia in 2006 at the age of 15, was beatified on October 10 in Assisi.
Pope Francis said the life of Acutis provides a witness for young people that true happiness is found when one puts God first.
“He did not settle into comfortable inaction, but grasped the needs of his time because in the weakest he saw the face of Christ,” Pope Francis said in his Angelus address on October 11.
“His witness shows today’s young people that true happiness is found by putting God first and serving Him in our brothers, especially the least,” said the pontiff.
Blessed Carlo Acutis, a Catholic teen with a great devotion to the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, became the first millennial to be declared “Blessed.”
At the age of 15, Acutis was diagnosed with leukemia. He offered his sufferings for Pope Benedict XVI and for the Church, saying “I offer all the suffering I will have to suffer for the Lord, for the pope, and the Church.”
Pope Francis first presented Acutis as an example for young people in post-synodal apostolic exhortation on young people, Christus Vivit.
The pope wrote that Acutis’ provided a model of how young people can use the internet and technology to spread the Gospel.
“It is true that the digital world can expose you to the risk of self-absorption, isolation and empty pleasure. But don’t forget that there are young people even there who show creativity and even genius. That was the case with Venerable Carlo Acutis,” the pope wrote in 2018.
In his Angelus message, Pope Francis said the Catholic Church is called to reach the geographical and existential peripheries of humanity where people can find themselves on the margins without hope.
The pope urged people “not to rest in comfortable and routine modes of evangelization and witness of charity, but to open the doors of our hearts and our communities to all because the Gospel is not reserved for a select few.”
