Pope Leo XIV on Sunday declared 15-year-old computer prodigy Carlo Acutis the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint, offering young Catholics a modern role model who embraced technology to spread the faith
and earn the nickname “God’s influencer.”
Leo canonised Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006, during an open-air Mass in St. Peter’s Square before an estimated 80,000 people, many of them millennials and couples with young children. In his first canonisation ceremony as pope, Leo also declared Pier Giorgio Frassati, another revered young Italian, a saint.
Leo said both men created “masterpieces” out of their lives by dedicating them to God.
“The greatest risk in life is to waste it outside of God’s plan,” Leo said in his homily. The new saints “are an invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards and make them masterpieces,” AP reported.
An ordinary life that became extraordinary, Acutis was born on May 3, 1991, in London to a wealthy but not particularly observant Catholic family. They moved back to Milan soon after he was born, and he enjoyed a typical, happy childhood, albeit marked by increasingly intense religious devotion.
From a young age, Acutis showed a deep fascination with computer science, eagerly studying college-level programming books.
He earned the nickname “God’s Influencer,” thanks to his main tech legacy: a multilingual website documenting so-called Eucharistic miracles recognised by the church, a project he completed at a time when the development of such sites was the domain of professionals.
Acutis was known to spend hours in prayer before the Eucharist each day. The Catholic Church has been encouraging this practice of Eucharistic adoration, as surveys show that many Catholics doubt Christ’s real presence in the consecrated host.
But Acutis limited himself to an hour of video games a week, apparently deciding long before TikTok that human relationships were far more important than virtual ones.
His discipline and self-control resonated with Church leaders, who have raised concerns about the risks of modern, technology-driven life.
Acutis fell ill with what was quickly diagnosed as acute leukaemia in October 2006, at age 15. Within days, he was dead. He was entombed in Assisi, a city renowned for its association with another popular saint, St. Francis.
In the years since his death, young Catholics have flocked by the millions to Assisi, where they can see the young Acutis through a glass-sided tomb, dressed in jeans, Nike sneakers and a sweatshirt.
After Pope Francis’ death in April, both saint-making ceremonies, which were scheduled for earlier this year, were postponed. Francis had fervently pushed the Acutis sainthood case forward, convinced that the church needed someone like him to attract young Catholics to the faith while addressing the promises and perils of the digital age.
Leo Kowalsky, an 8th grader at a Chicago school attached to the Blessed Carlo Acutis Parish, said, “It’s like I can maybe not be as great as Carlo may be, but I can be looking after him and be like, What would Carlo do?”
Acutis’ widespread popularity stems largely from the Vatican’s effort to present young Catholics with a “saint next door” — someone ordinary who lived an extraordinary life. In him, the Church found a relatable, tech-savvy millennial, part of the generation born between 1981 and 1996 that came of age in the new millennium.
The Vatican said 36 cardinals, 270 bishops and hundreds of priests had signed up to celebrate the Mass along with Leo in a sign of the saints’ enormous appeal to the hierarchy and ordinary faithful alike.
(With inputs from AP)
