“Acutis Was Extremely Close to the Heart of Pope Francis”: Tim Moriarty Discusses ‘Carlos Acutis: Roadmap to Reality’

On April 27th, Pope Francis was scheduled to officially canonize the first saint from the Millennial generation. Before his untimely death from leukemia at age 15, Carlo Acutis (born 1991), had combined his enthusiasm for computers and his fervent Catholic faith by creating websites to document miracles. Because of Pope Francis’s death, the canonization was delayed. In the meantime, the documentary Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality tells Acutis’ life story and uses it as an entryway to discuss Catholic perspectives on modern technology and its effect on people’s spiritual lives.

The film was produced by Castletown Media, which has in recent years found box office success in partnering with Fathom Events to release films touching on Catholic themes. Jesus Thirsts, for instance, was one of last year’s biggest nonfiction hits. We spoke with Castletown executive director Tim Moriarty, who co-directed and produced Roadmap to Reality, about the film, its funding, its release strategy, and how the Pope’s death has impacted the company’s plans. Roadmap to Reality had a nationwide release in theaters April 27–29. This conversation, which was conducted before yesterday’s election of Pope Leo XIV, has been edited and condensed for time and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: When we spoke last year, you mentioned that this film was in the works, and how it was happening because an investor approached you. Could you tell me more about him and how this film came together?

TIM MORIARTY: Our producing partner Jim Wahlberg was connected with a gentleman down in Beaumont, Texas, who was very moved by the story of Carlo Acutis, and he approached us to do a documentary on [Acutis’s] life. He’s a Church benefactor and had built a youth camp in Beaumont. The local bishop wanted to name the chapel after Acutis, and this gentleman had no idea who that was. So he read about Acutis and was really taken by his story. He thought it could be an inspiration to young people, especially those who are really struggling today. You look at the mental illness rates among teenagers, it’s really troubling. He had seen some of our previous work and reached out to us. Acutis’ mother was actually visiting Beaumont at the same time Jim and I went down there, and we were able to talk to her and get a deeper sense of what angle to take in this story.

Acutis has been hailed by many in the Church as the first “digital saint.” He was tech-savvy, he created websites, taught himself coding; Pope Francis called him “God’s Influencer.” But we wanted to explore a different angle. We were curious about how, on the outside, this young man led a seemingly ordinary life. How did he deal with the negative aspects of technology, the elements threatening our fundamental notions of what it is to be human? We wanted to use him as a model for navigating the digital world in juxtaposition to the real world.

D: Did anything from your first meeting with his mother end up getting used?

TM: We had our proper interview with her later. But one of the things that came out of that early conversation was the theme of remaining human in the midst of this technological shadow over us. She said that from a young age, her son was aware of the addictive qualities of these technologies. That informed the three components of the film. We have the biography of this millennial. We also try to tell a story of technology which goes all the way back to the dawn of modernity, to how our notions of science come from alchemy. We trace that through the centuries to the rise of the internet and its utopian dream that it was going to transform society. We also look at various strands of transhumanism, this idea of trying to cheat death. So we look at how Carlo Acutis used technology as a tool, rather than become a tool of technology.

To really bring it home, the third element is the class of 150 high school kids who go on a two-week pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi, culminating in a visit to the tomb of Acutis. They were asked to leave their phones and technology aside. We see what happens when these kids, who are on their screens for seven or eight hours a day, enter a much larger world.

D: Do you also relate to this as a film producer, using these technological tools but not letting the broader industry steer you?

TM: One of our intellectual heroes is Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist who talked about how “the medium is the message.” He analyzed the rise of television in culture. It’s not just that TV could be used for good or bad content; TV itself fundamentally shapes the ways human beings communicate. So we need to be sensitive to which medium we use to communicate. Right now, visual media, especially social media, is often just a war for attention, with super-fast cuts and other forms of manipulation to keep people watching. You can say there’s nothing wrong with trying to tell a good story, but if you’re manipulating people’s attention and hurting their attention span, are you actually doing anything good? Those questions are very much at the heart of what we want to explore.

D: Is that an active concern with your co-director Christian Surtz and other collaborators when constructing the film?

TM: Those conversations are important to us. A film can open a door to a horizon you didn’t have access to before. I think that if you just operate to make something “cool,” you lose the opportunity to invite the audience into a deeper experience. It’s an ongoing conversation, how various techniques resonate with our story, making sure the content and the medium are operating in harmony. One of my takeaways from this film concerns how our attention is manipulated. The highest faculty we have as human beings is to be attentive, to contemplate, to be fully present. That’s something Carlo Acutis was very sensitive to in his own use of digital technology.

D: That neatly sets up my next point. Last year, we talked about the Catholic conception of the flesh and spirituality, and how they’re linked. That theme is continued in this film, in how it discusses the way the digital world is linked to spirituality.

TM: Jesus Thirsts was an exploration of the Catholic sacramental worldview. From the Catholic point of view, the material world is essential. There’s an old phrase: “matter matters.” In this film, we wanted to explore that in a deeper way, juxtaposing materiality and virtuality. I think one of the dangers we’re increasingly facing is, in a way, the fulfillment of the split between the mind and the body, that Cartesian idea that the body is just a vehicle for the mind. You see various transhumanist movements, where the idea that we can upload our brain to a machine and live forever, that doesn’t see the body as essential. 

Carlo Acutis was a teenager reading college-level computer engineering books. But his whole purpose for being online was to move people offline, to bring them back to face-to-face encounters, to friendships where bodies are present in the same location, because there’s something deeply necessary about that in our human experience. This film really is a continuation of Jesus Thirsts, in the sense of being in a crisis of the real, one where young people are suffering. Something like 42% of young people have persistent feelings of hopelessness and despair. I think a strong hypothesis for why that’s the case is that we are not living in harmony with the structure of our being. You can live through an avatar on social media and project all of your meaning onto that avatar. If you don’t get certain likes, or if your followers aren’t as active as your friends’ followers, it impacts your whole sense of self. There’s this loss of real local community and friendships.

D: Has the delay in Acutis’ canonization changed any of your plans for the film? Would you hope to do another theatrical run when it actually happens?

TM: Obviously, that has been the question of this week. We were in Washington, D.C. for our world premiere, and at 4 a.m., I learned the Pope had passed away. We had to pivot and cancel the press coverage of that event out of respect for him. We had a premiere scheduled at the Vatican as well for the 24th, which also was canceled. 

We decided to move forward with the theatrical run on the 27th for a number of reasons. One is that Acutis was extremely close to the heart of Pope Francis. Every month, he would offer different prayer intentions, and in April, his very last one was that technology might not replace human relationships. He even talked about how this stuff can take us out of our connection to reality. This was something he was concerned about putting in front of people. The film has become a way to honor the Pope’s legacy. So that’s the rationale for keeping it at the dates that were given to us by Fathom. This is a conversation we want to have. We had partners, like the University of Notre Dame, that have created a robust discussion guide to help people think more about their use of technology.

In terms of bringing the film back to theaters, we don’t know when the new canonization date will be set. But we’re really open to a second window. We’re exploring a lot of those options right now, along with making it available on streaming. For now, we want to get it out there and keep with the plan. And we’ll go from there.

Dan Schindel is a freelance critic and full-time copy editor living in Brooklyn. He has previously worked as the associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic.