Archbishop Domenico Sorrentino, who as Bishop of Assisi-Nocera Umbra-Gualdo Tadino is responsible for the church that houses Acutis’ tomb, submitted a complaint to the Perugia public prosecutor’s office after learning of the sale, according to a statement from the diocese on 26 March.
An anonymous vendor sold the relic of Acutis’ hair for more than €2,000. It was reportedly among several relics of Acutis advertised online, besides relics of St Francis of Assisi. Archbishop Sorrentino said this was “impossible to accept”.
“We do not know if the relic is real or false,” he said, “but even if it was entirely fabricated, if there was a deception, we would not only be witnessing a fraud but also an injury to religious sentiments.”
Acutis died from leukaemia in 2006, aged 15, and as the cause for his canonisation advanced he has become “a sort of ‘patron saint of the internet’”, the diocese’s statement noted. Before his death, he developed a website recording eucharistic miracles.
After his initial burial in a local cemetery in Tregeno, in northern Italy, Acutis’ body was moved to Assisi where he had asked to be buried. Shortly after his death, the Archdiocese of Milan collected his belongings and in 2012 opened his cause with the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
Pope Francis declared him “venerable” in 2018 and the next year his body was exhumed and moved to a glass cabinet in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, known as the Sanctuary of the Spoilation. Archbishop Sorrentino was obliged to deny reports at the time that Acutis’ remains had been found incorrupt. The diocesan authorities prepared his remains for public display, with parts to be prepared as relics.
Various Acutis relics – including several hundred of his hair – have circulated around the world: the 2013 miracle approved for his beatification in 2020 occurred when a three-year-old Brazilian boy kissed a relic of his clothing and was cured of a serious pancreatic disease.
A relic toured Ireland in 2023, and others visited the National Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham and a church in the Diocese of Shrewsbury in 2024. The Archdiocese of Cardiff-Menevia hosted a relic tour in February this year. The Franciscan Friary in Killarney, Co Kerry and a shrine at London’s Church of Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane both house first-class Acutis relics. In September last year, a relic of his hair went missing from a Vocations Ireland stall at the National Ploughing Championships in Co Laois.
Sale of relics is forbidden under canon law, a prohibition reinforced by an instruction from the dicastery on “Relics in the Church: authenticity and preservation” in 2017.
In 2022, the Diocese of Assisi issued a warning about the circulation of relics that “do not meet the canonical requirements” set out in the instruction. It said they required proper documentation and a wax seal from its bishop and could only be granted freely by him, “without any sum of money in exchange”.
The postulator of Acutis’ cause, Dr Nicola Gori, asked clergy and laity to help the diocese fight “such a regrettable phenomenon” by reporting cases.
Widespread devotions to Acutis have increased in the months ahead of his canonisation on 27 April, during the Jubilee of Teenagers at the Vatican. Archbishop Sorrentino has reported that more than one million pilgrims have visited the shrine at Santa Maria Maggiore over the past year.
In the statement on Wednesday, the archbishop said the illicit sale of the relic showed where “the idol of money” can lead. “I fear that Satan had a hand in it,” he said.