The Bluestocking 363: Millennial saints
many of us die as photocopies
Happy Friday!
This week, I wrote about the subversive politics of The White Lotus (gift link). In podcastland, I was reunited with Stephen Bush—reliving the heady days of the 2010s New Statesman podcast—to talk with him and Armando on Strong Message Here about whether Keir Starmer has a “narrative” (and whether he needs one).
Helen
The First Millennial Saint (The Economist, £)
Some people at the basilica would have known more about Carlo: that he grew up in Milan as the child of a wealthy family who spent their holidays in Assisi. They might have known the little maxims attributed to him: “The only woman in my life is the Virgin Mary” or “We are all born as originals, but many of us die as photocopies.”
They might have known he was reputed to have converted his Mauritian nanny to Catholicism, or that his own mother said he had brought her back to religion. Antonia Salzano, Carlo’s mother, was a driving force behind the ceremony in Assisi. After her son’s death, she spoke at churches and conferences around the world about Carlo’s untroubled, open-hearted faith. She engaged journalists to write books about him, and hired designers and artists to create paintings, posters and prayer cards using his image.
These activities supported a broader campaign: the “cause” for Carlo’s canonisation.
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John Phipps on Carlo Acutis, an Italian boy who died young, and who might become the first millennial saint. I grew up Catholic, and have always been fascinated by the sanctification process, which requires “evidence” of two miracles caused by the dead person. I always got the sense that lots of Catholics found this faintly embarrassing, as the miracles are often quite whiffy. (To be honest, some of the recent saints are a bit eyebrow-raising, too—Padre Pio was canonised by JPII but his stigmata were downplayed in the process in a tacit admission that everyone else thought they were faked, probably with carbolic acid.)
There’s a very telling line in this piece about a potential American saint, Dorothy Day, and “a display cabinet full of memorabilia – a folding stool, a cane – that would become official relics if Day’s cause moved forward.” I’m at the stage of book promotion where everything reminds me of my book, but there’s a reason that I describe the modern figure of the genius as a secular saint. Geniuses create relics, too—we flock to see Jackson Pollock’s splattered floorboards (which was turned into an NFT) or Shakespeare’s birthplace. People go mad for first editions, and even madder for autograph manuscripts. Walter Benjamin even proposed that mass reproduction would compromise the “aura” of art, and it would instead by judged on its politics.
See? There’s a direct line from the museum giftshop to Catholics keeping bits of Carlo Acutis’s pericardium in a display case1.
PS. The other thing I find notable in this story is that no one is more invested in the idea that Carlo was a pure divine spirit—not a pot-smoking videogame enthusiast like his friends—than his grieving mother. Grief takes many forms and one of them is, apparently, trying to get your teenage son canonised.
Quick Links
“The Gouth of Hastings was fought at Sandlake Hill in mid-October, 1066. There, the English, under King Harold, won a breme and athel seyer over the Normans, led by Earl William ‘the Unrightluster’, a man who was willing to spill a swith great muchness of blood to fulfil his yearning for the English highsettle, wealth and his own wulder.” What if the English had won in 1066? Ed West investigates the other path our hybrid language might have taken (The Wrong Side of History, Substack).
Bluestocking recommends: The Enemy Within, by Adam Macqueen. The third book in Adam’s Tommy Wildebloode series, The Inalienable Right, has just come out, but I’m one behind so I just read the second one, set against a background of student politics and the Brighton Bomb. This protagonist of the series is a former rent boy, and Adam’s research is peerless, so these books are an intriguing combination of horny and historically accurate.
“I don’t believe imposter syndrome exists. . . I think that women in positions of authority who feel like imposters are reacting very rationally to a culture that treats them as imposters.” Deeply relatable post about perfectionism from Caroline Criado Perez (Substack).
“Britain is a rich country with the world’s 6th largest economy and the highest tax income for decades, which raises a simple question — why do we seem so broke? Tom Calver, Data Editor at The Times, tackled the question last week. The big picture is pretty simple: we have a huge debt burden sucking over £100bn out of the budget every year (more than the entire education budget and nearly double the defence budget); and that would be okay-ish if the economy were growing, but it’s not. That creates what Calver calls, in the kind of obscure jargon popular among data nerds, ‘a uniquely shit set of circumstances for the government.’” Convince me otherwise, but shouldn’t the Tory government have levelled with people that Covid was bloody expensive, and we would need higher taxes to pay off some of the money we borrowed to cover furlough, bounceback funds etc? (The Value of Nothing)
“There’s another group of people, though, about whom we might have a slightly different take - people whose lives are easy and vote for disruptive populism on the assumption it won’t change anything about their lives. These people believe in FADFO — Fuck Around, Don’t Find Out.” Ben Ansell on FADFO voters (Substack).
Book tour: My second book, The Genius Myth, is published in June. Hear me talk about it with Armando Iannucci in London on June 19—use the code GENIUS25 for a 25 percent discount on tickets.
Pre-order the book here (UK) and here (US).
Update: this post has been edited since publication, because I originally wrote “brain tumour” instead of leukaemia.
Another weird Catholic thing—which oddly enough, the church shares with the Soviets—is an obsession with “bodily incorruptibility”. Having your corpse not decay is considered a big sign of holiness. Of course, this is something that has been faked over the centuries. But it persists, and it’s notable that both Padre Pio and poor Carlo’s corpses are displayed wearing lifelike silicon masks of their faces.
Great piece on the White Lotus, Helen! I also listened to the Mike White interview on Andrew Sullivan's podcast, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind. Apparently, Mike and I had a very similar academic experience.
I went back to school in the early 90s after a few years off, to pursue my masters in sociology, and to my great surprise discovered "Critical Theory" and postmodernism, the dominating ideology of the time. Held in great regard by the department, I found it to be mostly rubbish! (To this day, I roll my eyes almost to the back of my head when I encounter the name "Foucault.")
Just as White describes, I experienced CT/postmodernism as perhaps a semi-interesting game, with its own language and particular framing of the world, but as a dominant theory it didn't seem to add much or even accurately represent the real world -- and in particular the PEOPLE in the world -- that I could see with my own eyes. I got FAR more out of novels, actual observation, and experience with folks.
I was absolutely thrilled to see you had a piece out on the BEST show on television (well, my FAVORITE one, anyway) and you never disappoint. Of course, I imagine we can cue the immediate reactions to the "W-word" (we really might want a new term at this point), but I hope most Atlantic subscribers will read the entire article; it's terrific.
"Convince me otherwise, but shouldn’t the Tory government have levelled with people that Covid was bloody expensive, and we would need higher taxes to pay off some of the money we borrowed to cover furlough, bounceback funds etc"
But that would have opened all kinds of questions about the Covid-strategy and whether it was worth it long-term. It suits all sides to pretend that lockdowns were effectively free.