VATICAN CITY — Pope Leo XIV declared a 15-year-old computer whiz the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint Sunday, giving the next generation of Catholics a relatable role model who used technology to spread the faith and earn the nickname “God’s influencer.”
Leo canonized 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. During the first saint-making Mass of his pontificate, Leo also canonized another popular Italian figure who died young, Pier Giorgio Frassati.
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.”
Acutis was born May 3, 1991, in London to a wealthy but not particularly observant Italian 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.
He spoke his first word at 3 months, his mother Antonia Salzano says, and could speak clearly before he was half a year old.
As a child, she said, Acutis became fascinated with the mystery of the Eucharist — the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. While other children played soccer or dated, Acutis would conduct exhaustive research on miraculous events linked to the Holy Host.
He called the wafer a “highway to heaven.”
“When he was 9 years old, he was not like a 9-year-old normal child,” Acutis’ mother told The Washington Post. “No, he was like an old person with this intuition. He had received special skills from God.”
Acutis was particularly interested in computer science and devoured college-level books on programming even as a youngster. He earned the nickname “God’s Influencer,” thanks to his main tech legacy: a multilingual website documenting so-called Eucharistic miracles recognized by the church, a project he completed at a time when the development of such sites was the domain of professionals.
“Carlo was well aware that the whole apparatus of communications, advertising and social networking can be used to lull us, to make us addicted to consumerism and buying the latest thing on the market, obsessed with our free time, caught up in negativity,” Pope Francis said in 2019. “Yet he knew how to use the new communications technology to transmit the Gospel, to communicate values and beauty.”
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. That discipline and restraint has proved appealing to the Catholic hierarchy, which has sounded the alarm about the dangers of today’s tech-driven society.
In October 2006, at age 15, Acutis fell ill with what was quickly diagnosed as acute leukemia. Within days, he was dead. He was entombed in Assisi, which is known for its association with another popular saint, St. Francis.
ASSISI TOMB
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. He seems as if he’s sleeping, and questions have swirled about how his body was so well-preserved, especially since parts of his heart have even toured the world as relics.
Both saint-making ceremonies had been scheduled for earlier this year, but were postponed after Francis’ death in April. 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.
“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?'” said Leo Kowalsky, an eighth grader at a Chicago school attached to the Blessed Carlo Acutis Parish.
Kowalsky said he was particularly excited that his own namesake — Pope Leo — would be canonizing the patron of his school. “It’s kind of all mashed up into one thing, so it is a joy to be a part of,” Kowalsky said in an interview last week.
Much of Acutis’ popularity is thanks to a concerted campaign by the Vatican to give the next generation of faithful a “saint next door” who was ordinary but did extraordinary things in life. In Acutis, they found a relatable tech-savvy millennial — the term used to describe a person born roughly between 1981 and 1996 who was the first generation to reach adulthood 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.
The young man’s rapid rise to sainthood, a process than can take decades, or even centuries, has also generated skeptics within the faith.
Even his supporters note that Acutis’ cause enjoyed special advantages, including being the son of an extremely wealthy Italian family that had influence within the Vatican and had made contributions to the church. Acutis’ father and paternal grandfather are major insurance industry executives. Before his death, Acutis’ mother became the curator of a Vatican committee on martyrs. Acutis also had two previous saints in his family tree.
EMBLEM OF FUTURE
An hour before the Mass, St. Peter’s Square was already filled with pilgrims, many of them young millennial Italians, many with toddlers in strollers.
Matthew Schmalz, professor of religious studies at Holy Cross college in Worcester, Mass., said Acutis’ canonization extends the church tradition of popular piety to the digital age.
“He becomes an emblem or model of how Catholics should approach and use the digital world — with discipline and with a focus on traditional Catholic spirituality that defies the passage of time,” he said in a statement. “He is a new saint of simplicity for the ever complex digital landscape of contemporary Catholicism.”
Frassati, the other saint being canonized Sunday, lived from 1901-1925, when he died at age 24 of polio. He was born into a prominent Turin family but is known for his devotion to serving the poor and carrying out acts of charity while spreading his faith to his friends.
Catherine Kluempers, 31, director of student activities at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., came to the canonization to honor Frassati, who is the patron saint of a student organization at the college. He’d been “full of life, a jokester, adventurous and yet he shared his faith doing the things he loved,” she said. The organization has adopted his motto, “to the heights,” to apply to its activities, which “should be fun and engaging, but with a higher goal, to strive to sainthood,” she said.
Pope John Paul II beatified Frassati, the penultimate step to sainthood, in 1990 after the Vatican deemed the healing of a person in the United States to be a miracle attributed to his intercession. Pope Francis recognized a second miracle in 2024, opening the way to Frassati’s canonization.
Information for this article was contributed by Nicole Winfield of The Associated Press, Elisabetta Povoledo of The New York Times and Anthony Faiola and Stefano Pitrelli of The Washington Post.
Copyright © 2025, Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC. (NWA Media)
All rights reserved.
This document may not be reprinted without the express written permission of Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC
Material from the Associated Press is Copyright © 2025, Associated Press and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press text, photo, graphic, audio and/or video material shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium. Neither these AP materials nor any portion thereof may be stored in a computer except for personal and noncommercial use. The AP will not be held liable for any delays, inaccuracies, errors or omissions therefrom or in the transmission or delivery of all or any part thereof or for any damages arising from any of the foregoing. All rights reserved.
