By Brad Miner.

By now, most readers of this site will know about Blessed Carlo Acutis, the Italian teenager who died in 2006 and will be canonized this coming Sunday, April 27.

And on the 27th, 28th, and 29th of this month, Fathom Events will present Tim Moriarity's new documentary about Acutis - Catholicism's first millennial saint - in special screenings at select theaters across the country. Click here to purchase tickets for yourself, your family, or your parish.

I wouldn't normally add this sort of promotional plug for a film, but Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality (click here for the theatrical trailer) is a fascinating and important film about a remarkable young man, and it deserves a wide audience.

And it's not just a film about soon-to-be Saint Carlo; it's at least as much about the impact of the digital revolution and how we should navigate it as Catholics.

A group of students go on a pilgrimage to Rome under the auspices of the University of Mary in North Dakota. As the trip begins, they surrender their cell phones. The point is to immerse the kids in the Eternal City without the usual obsessive distractions of screen time. And this is not just to ensure the students actually look up at the Sistine Chapel ceiling and not images of it on TikTok; it's as much to liberate them from the isolation, fragmentation, and depression too many kids are experiencing as a result of the weakening bonds of interpersonal relationships that comes from dwelling in the so-called "virtual" world.

The film uses Carlo Acutis as an example of how it's possible to overcome the crisis of ongoing mental, emotional, and spiritual illness among young people. To wit, these data on high school students from the Centers for Disease Control:

29% experience poor mental health

42% have persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness

22% have considered suicide

18% have made a suicide plan

10% have attempted suicide

This is not good.

If young people emulate Carlo Acutis rather than some shallow Internet "influencer," they'll have a better shot at achieving true and lasting happiness.

Carlo loved the Internet and online gaming, and he became a web designer, but he also strictly limited the time he spent online - usually to an hour a day. He did so because he saw the danger of preferring virtuality to reality.

The documentary features a few people who personally knew Carlo Acutis (family and friends), and many more who never met him but who are inspired by him, including priests and bishops, academics and journalists, some of whom are well-known on the Internet.

Their comments about Carlo are interspersed with scenes of the North Dakota kids visiting the highlights in Rome and Assisi. The climactic scene comes when the students visit Acutis' tomb at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Assisi. A number of them are affected by seeing his body. But it's the story of his saintly life - his dedication to the Eucharist, his self-discipline, and his courage in the face of death from a rare and incurable leukemia - that most stirs them. It certainly moved me.

One longs to see young people figure out how to live joyfully in the digital and real worlds, and it's not wrong to worry that this will only become more difficult as "progress" reaches a terrestrial version of light speed.

At the crossroads of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism there may be a point at which the quest for eternal life will become for many a purely and militantly secular scientific endeavor.

For my part, I'm sure of it. The only "material" glitch will likely be the organic human brain. From the dawn of Internet-based computing, we've been speaking a new language about memory - with terms such as storage, random access memory, cache, and using an ever-increasing series of acronyms: ROM, PROM, EPROM, EEPROM, and on and on, rather like the dizzying proliferation of gender identities.

But the brain is deeply intertwined with the soul, I suspect, although it may be ...