Priest appeals for return of ‘God’s Influencer’ relic lost at Ploughing Championships

A relic of a teenager to be canonised as the first saint of the 21st century in the Catholic Church has been missing since put on display at the Ploughing Championships at Ratheniska, Co Laois, last week.

A lock of Blessed Carlo Acutis’s hair, in a small black box, was brought to the Vocations Ireland stand there, along with relics of St Padre Pio, by Capuchin priest Fr Bryan Shortall as part of a drive to attract more people to the religious life.

Fr Shortall recalled how, as he turned to bless people at the stand, “I left it down, beside the St Padre Pio mitten, and when I turned around it was gone. Someone must have picked it up.”

A security man there advised him to “put something on social media and that I talk to the local station, Midlands 103″. He did both, but the relic remains missing.

Carlo Acutis, known as “God’s influencer”, died of leukaemia in 2006 aged 15. He is to become the Catholic church’s first millennial saint following confirmation by the Vatican last Spring of a second miracle through his intercession and needed for his canonisation. That is expected to take place next year.

Born in London in 1991, before his family returned to Milan, the teenager was a computer prodigy who helped spread Catholic teaching online before his death.

Fr Shortall explained that relics were venerated because of their close association with a person now believed to be close to God. Usually they are “part of a saint’s body or their clothing. It is a way of getting closer to a person, like having a jersey belonging to Ronaldo or Messi or something of Taylor Swift’s,” he said.

Should anyone find the missing relic, he has asked that it be returned to him at the Capuchin Friary in Dublin’s Church Street, where he is director of the Padre Pio Apostolate.

Meanwhile relics of St Bernadette of Lourdes were at Our Lady of Victories Church in Ballymun on Friday. Mainly bone fragments in a reliquary, they arrived in Ireland on September 4th and will visit each of the Catholic Church’s 26 dioceses on the island before returning to Lourdes in early November.