CHICAGO (OSV News) — When a Chicago resident ran into a young man in Assisi, Italy, holding his piece of mosaic art — a rendering of Blessed Carlo Acutis made of more than 1,000 toy pieces — she felt compelled to request a second version for her home parish named after the soon-to-be saint.
Kelly Legamaro’s chance encounter with 25-year-old Johnny Vrba happened in late April in Assis, outside the home of Bishop Domenico Sorrentino, whose diocese includes Assisi. Blessed Carlo’s body is entombed in the city’s Church of St. Mary Major.
Blessed Carlo, who will be the first millennial saint, was scheduled to be canonized April 27, and Vrba had hoped to give his 3-by-4-foot mosaic of the smiling teenager to Carlo’s mother, Antonia, on the occasion of the canonization. However, less than a week before that date, on April 21, Pope Francis died, and the canonization was postponed. It has since been rescheduled for Sept. 7; in the meantime, Vrba’s original mosaic is being housed at the Vatican’s youth center, Centro San Lorenzo.
On the day that Legamaro met Vrba, she and her husband “talked to Bishop (Sorrentino) for two hours,” he recalled. “I talked to (the) bishop for two minutes, and in those two minutes, Kelly was convicted (about) the piece and then commissioned this one, which is behind me currently.”
Vrba was speaking July 23 in St. Hedwig Church, part of Blessed Carlo Acutis Parish in northwest Chicago. His second version of the mosaic stood in front of the altar, ready to be unveiled and blessed.
The portrait of Blessed Carlo is a collage of mostly plastic toy soldiers, the majority of them facing the left side of the teen’s forehead, where a tiny bloodied figurine of Jesus on the cross sits with a Mary figure facing it.
The gray, black and white figures facing Jesus represent “people that in today’s day and age (are) pointing their weapons, all at Jesus … saying, ‘Crucify him, crucify him,'” Vrba explained to OSV News. “And the Christians that are going against the grain, that are going against the culture, are all of the colored figures, any figure that has color. And there’s exactly 163.”
That number represents the 163 Eucharistic miracles that Blessed Carlo researched and documented on a website he created. Among the colored figurines is a tiny Pikachu, the yellow electrified mouse hero of Pokémon, which was Blessed Carlo’s favorite video game — although he was always careful to play in moderation, Vrba quickly added.
Carlo, who died of leukemia when he was 15 in 2006, developed a strong devotion to the Eucharist when he was a small child and, after receiving his first Communion, attended daily Mass faithfully. As he grew up, he became a self-taught computer programmer. By the time he was 11, he was working on the Eucharistic miracles project.
Using one’s gifts to honor the Lord
Vrba first heard about Carlo Acutis from a friend one year ago. He became absorbed in the future saint’s story, reading, watching videos and listening to podcasts. Carlo’s dedication to teaching people about the Eucharist particularly inspired Vrba, who’d had a transformative experience during Eucharistic adoration at World Youth Day in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2023.
“I was pierced when I saw millions of pilgrims in Lisbon, kneeling, and I knew. It’s either all or nothing,” he said. “It’s either Jesus, body, blood, soul and divinity, or it’s not. And it is, as a matter of fact. So Carlo having a place where people can come and discover all of the incredible (Eucharistic) miracles, that really touched my soul. Because Carlo used his gifts, which were computer programming, to make that website.”
When Vrba, a tech start-up founder and multimedia artist based in Denver, saw some of Chicago protest artist Roger J. Carter’s mosaic pieces of iconic African American political figures — some made of toy soldier figurines — he thought, “Wow, maybe instead of using this for what he was using it for, (I can) use it for the Lord.”
Vrba was also struck by how Blessed Carlo “is very relatable to” young people for his “ordinary exterior life,” in which the young man made videos with friends and his cats and dogs, played soccer and traveled because “he was a boy, at the end of the day.”
All of these aspects and more about Carlo’s life — and the two miracles attributed to him — are depicted throughout the mosaic. The first miracle involved a young Brazilian boy who was completely healed from a rare congenital disease of the pancreas. The second involved the recovery of a university student in Florence, Italy, who had suffered a serious head injury when she fell off her bicycle in July 2022.
A red cable running from Blessed Carlo’s head, which has a motherboard, to his heart, another motherboard, symbolizes the fusion of faith and reason that Vrba said is essential to living a Christian life.
A parish united by Carlo
Blessed Carlo has also been instrumental in bringing together the two churches that now make up the parish named for him, according to its pastor, Resurrectionist Father Ed Howe.
He told OSV News that in 2020, as a significant number of churches in the Archdiocese of Chicago experienced sometimes contentious mergers, parishioners at St. Hedwig and St. John Berchmans picked the name of the newly beatified teen. He had been declared “Blessed” by Pope Francis on Oct. 10, 2020.
When his canonization was announced in May 2024, they came together to plan and hold multiple events related to the canonization.
“Sometimes, in a merger, some people stay in their church and don’t mix with the other church. So a merger, hopefully, is also a point of bringing people together from both communities, and Carlos Acutis has been instrumental in that,” he said.
Father Howe said he had never seen anything like the mosaic, which he described as filled with “tremendous detail” about Blessed Carlo’s life that parishioners can learn even more about by scanning a QR code.
Legamaro and her husband commissioned the piece for $10,000 plus $700 for materials and travel.
“It’s so worth it because kids can learn in a different way, in a modern way. That’s going to mean something to them. Like a kid in jeans, in a backpack like them … that’s very relatable,” she and her husband, Michael Legamaro, told OSV News at the unveiling of the mosaic at the parish, which is the only one in the U.S. (so far) bearing Blessed Carlo’s name.
Legamaro, a lifelong Catholic, said she developed a deep devotion to the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist after studying panels from Blessed Carlo’s Eucharistic miracles exhibit, which travels the world and stopped by the parish last year.
“Miracle after miracle, country after country, and I just felt Jesus in that moment through Carlo,” she said. “And ever since, I’ve not stopped following these missions that I’m hearing … ‘Go to Rome. Go to the canonization.’ And that’s how I got led to Johnny. I don’t understand it, but I’m calling it the grace wave that I’m riding, of Carlo.”
