By Megan Peterson, Features/Multimedia Editor
ROCKFORD—In Holy Family Parish’s St. Carlo Acutis Youth Room, a larger-than-life mural of the new saint invites viewers into a painting of the church’s Eucharistic adoration chapel. It’s the work of local Catholic artist Monica Skrzypczak, who’s been guided by St. Carlo since starting her art business.
Her artistic mission began behind-the-scenes while studying theater production and management at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Missing art classes as an upperclassman, Skrzypczak started drawing the tabernacle during retreats.
“I was drawn to drawing Jesus in the Eucharist,” she says.
After graduating, Skrzypczak made a pilgrimage to Poland, where she encountered beautiful European churches and felt a calling to bring greater beauty to churches and homes. She started her art business “Outpouring of Trust” on Oct. 12, 2018 — which happened to be Carlo’s future feast day.
When his April 27 canonization date was announced, a priest commissioned her to create an image of him. While sketching on her iPad, she had an idea: “Oh, what if he’s inviting you into the chapel?”
What first came to mind was the adoration chapel at Holy Family, her own parish. However, the priest was not at Holy Family, so she created a different chapel design. But the idea of her home parish chapel lingered.
Then Father Phillip Kaim, Holy Family pastor, asked Skrzypczak about painting a mural of Carlo for the new youth group room — an opportunity to paint the future saint with the backdrop she’d first imagined.
It was “a total God moment,” she says.
Painting Carlo and the chapel
To begin her first big mural, Skrzypczak traced her sketch with the help of a projector. Flat wall paint soon proved helpful as she realized everything would need two coats of paint. This way, she wouldn’t need to re-mix colors. She painted the stained glass, drawing the windows’ vine designs trailing beyond the edges of the chapel. She also added colorful swirling lines — visualizing God’s love radiating outward.
Then came dark outlines on everything in the chapel to match the windows. That idea had been in her original sketch.
“I ended the night happy, giddy. I was like, ‘It works — it looks the way I imagined it,’” she says.
But she hadn’t finished Carlo.
Once Skrzypczak started with her realistic, painterly style on Carlo, the two styles contrasted. And she’d struggled with mixing the wall paint to get the skin tones she wanted.
Eddie Turek, Holy Family’s youth minister, reassured her that if she were to stop, the mural would be beautiful.
She was torn over the disconnect between the two styles, though. “It’s not the way I envision it,” she recalls, “and am I just going to settle for: ‘It looks fine?’”
She recharged at a Catholic conference and returned, emboldened. She’d learned about paint colors that mimicked her usual portrait palette and jumped back in. “You just gotta trust the gut, try something, and if it doesn’t work … it’s still paint. You can still fix it later,” she says.
In an 11-hour marathon day, Skrzypczak repainted Carlo and the chapel so they looked three-dimensional, as if viewers could walk right in. “It was very scary!” she emphasizes. “But I knew that it had to happen.”
In 11 days at the church, after 65 hours of painting time and an uncounted number of hours designing, she finished the mural in time to leave for Carlo’s canonization.
Carlo’s impact
“It’s just so cool that the whole story has happened very much since I was alive,” Skrzypczak says about St. Carlo.
She had first heard about him when he was a Servant of God after finding his website on Eucharistic miracles. She notes that her own background is Eucharist-centered as well and finds inspiration in his love for Jesus in the Eucharist.
She’s excited to see how he inspires the kids that will use the St. Carlo Acutis Youth Room. Since she works with Holy Family’s youth group, she can see that firsthand.
On Sept. 7, St. Carlo Acutis’s canonization day, the youth group gathered in their newly dedicated room for a party.
Amid excitement over a pizza dinner, a group shared their thoughts about St. Carlo:
“He is very smart!” one says.
“I think it’s really cool that he is just an inspiration to all of us because he’s, like, one of the only teenager saints,” says another kid.
And lastly: he helps “people have faith.” They can see, “Oh, someone else did that. That gives me hope that I can do that!”
Find progress videos at “Outpouring of Trust” on Facebook and outpouringoftrust.sacredart on Instagram. For more information, visit https://outpouringoftrust.com/
