ANDREA GRILLO, MODERN LITURGIST, PERHAPS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE POPE FRANCIS’ DEBACLE, “TC”, SHOULD BE SIDELINED UNDER POPE LEO XIV AND HIS MARVELOUS CHANGE OF TONE AT THE VATICAN AND IN THE PAPACY…

When I was in Rome for three months in the fall of 2013, just a few months after Pope Francis’ election, I heard from theologians there that Pope Francis was surrounding himself with all the wrong people and listening to them rather than sound theologians. 

It is true, too, that Pope Francis distanced himself from the liturgical theologians that the liturgically brilliant Pope Benedict XVI brought to the Vatican and its various liturgical departments.

The school of thought that Pope Francis relied on is led by the rather nasty, rude and inconsiderate Andrea Grillo and very much of the ugly, negative tone of Pope Francis’ papacy.

Pope Leo XIV has had stunning success in changing the negative tone at the Vatican and enabling rank and file bishops and  other clergy as well as the laity to breathe a sigh of relief as we go forward with clarity, charity and common sense in all things ecclesial. 

Andrea Grillo needs to go, in my most humble opinion.

Just read the following and you’ll see and read what I mean!

Young Carlo Acutis and Eucharistic rudeness (Via Google Translate from original Italian)

by Andrea Grillo

How is it possible that a young blessed can communicate a Eucharistic theology so old, so heavy, obsessive, focused on the inessential and so neglected instead on the decisive things? How is it possible that all the progress that the Church has made in the last 70 years, in terms of understanding the ecclesial value of the Eucharist and its celebration, has been communicated, in such a distorted way to the young ardent communicator, so much so as to suggest to him an understanding so deficient, so defective, so one-sided? Who indulged him in this interest in "miracles", neglecting the true miracle?

I asked myself where the reasons for this little scandal lie. To document myself, I searched on the official website of the Carlo Acutis Association, which can be found at https://www.carloacutis.com/. The section dedicated to Eucharistic miracles is truly singular. Perhaps it is the clearest attestation of the distortion of gaze and vision that was perhaps inadvertently suggested to Carlo, or more likely clumsily reworked and then imposed on him, by bad teachers. From whom Carlo should have been defended and not handed over. If you examine the section (which can be found at https://www.miracolieucaristici.org/it/Liste/list.html/), you can read, at the beginning, three texts, written by Card. Comastri, by Mons. Raffaello Martinelli and by P. Roberto Coggi O.P. These are rather singular texts, because they seem to come from another world, from isolated offices or from rooms without communication. To be on the threshold of a “super-communicator” saint, it seems to me quite a paradox.

Let's start with the Cardinal, who starts off very badly: he recalls having been contested for a book written years before on Eucharistic miracles. But let us read the text of this very unfortunate attack in his Preface:

“A few years ago I published a study on Eucharistic miracles, but, to my great surprise, I received a letter that contested the documentation collected, because it claimed that the Eucharistic “bleedings” were the fruit of a naive era and easily inclined to construct miracles. I suffered greatly for this statement. And the reason was simple: things were not like that; the facts speak unequivocally. Padre Pio, a man of the twentieth century, was not a living Eucharistic miracle?”

On the threshold of an “exhibition” of Eucharistic miracles, such a uselessly personal and off-topic beginning (what does Padre Pio have to do with it?) seems a little out of step and without any real relevance to the topic.

But let us come to the second, more extensive text by Monsignor Martinelli. Here the tone changes and we enter into a very detailed discussion, but which begins by covering one's face: Eucharistic miracles are not "objects of faith". Excellent. But then the author, who must justify his presentation, begins to illustrate the "positivity" of Eucharistic miracles. Here is the pars construens

Eucharistic Miracles can be a useful and fruitful aid to our faith. For example, they can:

Help us go beyond the visible, the sensible, to admit the existence of a beyond, a beyond.

Precisely because it is recognized as an extraordinary fact, the Eucharistic Miracle cannot be explained by scientific facts and reasoning, it goes beyond human reason, and challenges man, urging him to ‘go beyond’ the sensible, the visible, the human, that is, to admit that there is something that is incomprehensible, inexplicable humanly with human reason alone, scientifically undemonstrable.

Offer the opportunity to speak, in catechesis, of public Revelation and its importance for the Church and the Christian.”

I ask the reader: what kind of reasoning is this? Are miracles “occasions” to talk about something else? 

This is followed by a long section on “public revelation,” but the discussion on the Eucharist, in its ecclesial value, remains totally outside the text.

Finally, Roberto Coggi’s text puts the icing on the cake. Right at the beginning of his Introduction he writes:

“We know the Catholic doctrine regarding the real presence. With the words of the consecration: “This is my Body,” “This is my Blood,” the substance of the bread becomes the Body of Christ, and the substance of the wine his Blood.”

Perhaps someone should have updated the Dominican father on the fact that the 1970 reform of the Missal has changed what he believes to be “Catholic doctrine,” but that’s just his imagination. The words of the “formula” are not just those he quotes, but include many others: “Take and eat it, all of you: this is my body given up for you,” and then “Take and drink it, all of you, this is the cup of my blood, for the new and eternal covenant, poured out for you and for all, for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me”. It is not at all surprising that a culture of Eucharistic miracles, which forgets the only “miracle”, is linked to a minimal, dry and outdated reading of both the consecration and the Eucharistic celebration. It is useful that, immediately afterwards, Fr. Coggi correctly repeats Thomas Aquinas’ theory on Eucharistic miracles. But, precisely, that theory eliminates any possibility of a “miracle”: the body and blood are only “appearances” of the bread and wine. This should exclude the valorization of the miracle, showing above all its limit. Especially if we are talking about a 14-year-old teenager!

And yet these are the three official speeches, which present the “exhibition on Eucharistic miracles”. That this feature is brought as an “argument” in favor of Carlo’s sainthood is truly surprising. Should we perhaps go so far as to say: we recognize him as a saint “despite his distorted fixation on Eucharistic miracles”? The issue is actually more serious, because it does not concern a young adolescent, but the false teachers who were around him during his life and who after his death want to project their bad theology onto him as an example.

Eucharistic rudeness is not a problem for young Carlo, whose short life still carries a light with it. The problem does not concern the adolescent, but the adults who put these words, these images, these reconstructions, these unbalanced and unhealthy interests in his mouth. It is a Eucharistic rudeness that is not ashamed to write Prefaces, Presentations and Introductions, which seem, these yes, written by adolescents without any theological formation on the "true" and "only" Eucharistic miracle of ecclesial communion. On this aspect, which truly justifies the centrality of the Eucharist in the life of Christians, none of the three authors has spent a single line. But what am I saying, a single word, if not by mistake, quoting the catechism, but almost distractedly. The true heart of the Eucharist, the unity between the sacramental body and the body ecclesial, is erased and forgotten. After all, it is something that is rarely frequented, especially by adults. Should this form of serious Eucharistic rudeness perhaps become, through Carlo who was its first victim, a model to propose to all young people? But do we really want to joke? Who will have the nerve – and the heart – to support such an absurdity?