Hello!
Recently, our parishes hosted the Canonization Party for Blessed Carlo Acutis!
Our family helped put it on, we came up with some of the ideas and we worked on it with other people from our parishes.
The idea was to have the event on the Saturday night before Divine Mercy Sunday- Blessed Carlo’s canonization was scheduled for that Sunday. But sadly, because of Pope Francis’ death, his canonization got postponed. We still decided to go ahead with the event and make it an “In anticipation of the Canonization of Blessed Carlo Acutis Party!”
The goal was for it to be an event for families because Blessed Carlo will be the first millennial saint! We rented the Eucharistic Miracle Exhibit that Blessed Carlo put together. We started the evening with the regular Saturday night Mass but we had 6 boy servers (which is unusual for our parishes), a youth choir and our lector was also a teen. My sister and I were in the choir and my brother served! Then we did a short time of Adoration with some quiet prayer, a Divine Mercy Chaplet for Pope Francis and a pretty acoustic song, sung by one of our family friends who is also a young adult. Then, in the PAC, we had pizza, crafts, cool info and activities about saints, the Eucharistic Miracle Exhibit and we projected Mario Kart up on the wall for the priests to play against the kids (Blessed Carlo is known for playing video games)! That was a huge hit! It looked like the kids and the priests really enjoyed it! Our two priests did it, plus one from nearby.
The place that gave us the Exhibit also gave us a cardboard cutout of Blessed Carlo, which was awesome! We had a photo section and signs to hold up as you got your picture with him!
Overall, the event was a huge success! We had a lot of families and it was a great way to get people exposed to Adoration, Eucharistic Miracles, Blessed Carlo and just to have an opportunity to have fun with each other and our priests!
I did another post about the slideshow I put together for the party, you can read the post and check out the slideshow here.
What’s something you liked about it (and why)? I loved the planning process! I’ve been interested in working for the Church in some kind of faith formation/event role. This was a great opportunity for me to be a part of, especially because my mom was one of the main planners. Her and my dad are really great at event planning and I’ve gotten a lot of experience just being around them. I went to a planning meeting with her for this event, and I had so much fun! I liked all the details and things to manage! I loved this because I have a deep passion for Catholicism, for helping people grow in their faith and I also love planning, facilitating and managing things/people so this really put it all together! It was a fun blend of creativity and management, which I thrive in.
What’s something you disliked about it (and why)? During the actual party, I didn’t really like how our video game management was set up. It was very haphazard, even though we made a big board about signing up and we had three clipboards that you could put your name down on, one for each priest, we should have had a better system. Plus the clipboards got moved to the video game tables eventually. We should have been clearer with each priest about when to play and when not to, and should have had a better system for calling out when it was someone else’s turn. Not everybody got to play because the priest wasn’t there or because it was naturally dying down, because we didn’t know who they were or we couldn’t read their name- it was a lot of kids handwriting! Maybe we should have just done a line, I don’t know. It was also very loud and you could barely tell when someone was talking on the microphone so I don’t know how we would have communicated if we were changing something or calling out names. But we didn’t know how it all would work. The video games were still a lot of fun, I think it went pretty well! It probably doesn’t matter because we may never do this event again- it was very specific! Even still, I disliked some of the process.
What was your biggest takeaway or lesson? I think my biggest takeaway was having this experience- helping to plan a faith-related event. Like I said above, I really enjoyed it, so this was a great opportunity to be involved in. And it was nice to keep seeing my passion for these kinds of things because it may determine what I do more of in the future.
What is something you’re curious to learn more about as a result of this experience? I’m curious to learn about a managing/event planning/facilitation/faith formation job. I could do more of this stuff too, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a career so I’d be interested in learning about and getting better at it. I love these projects and I think I’m pretty good at these things. Being a part of this party was fun for me!
Thank you for reading!
Lucy