A London-born Italian teenage computer whiz who died in 2006 age 15, has been declared the Catholic church’s first millennial saint during an open-air mass in a packed St Peter’s Square.
Carlo Acutis, who died of leukaemia, built multilingual websites to spread Catholic teaching, later earning him the nickname “God’s influencer”. He was canonised by Pope Leo XIV alongside Pier Giorgio Frassati, another young Catholic activist, who died a century ago.
A hour before the mass, St Peter’s Square had filled with tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the world, many of them millennial Italians and Americans, as Acutis’s family looked on.
A crowd numbering an estimated 80,000 braved sweltering heat, and many were forced to spill out into the boulevards next to the square, with witnesses describing the atmosphere as joyous and party-like.
“The greatest risk in life is to waste it outside of God’s plan,” Leo said in his homily, saying Acutis and Frassati had made “masterpieces” of their lives by dedicating them to God. The new saints “are an invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards”, he said.
Both ceremonies had been scheduled for earlier this year, but were postponed after the death of Pope Francis, who had fervently pushed Acutis’s sainthood case forward to attract young Catholics to the faith.
Tapestries depicting images of Saints Pier Giorgio and Carlo were hung on the facade of St Peter’s Basilica as the two men were celebrated like pop stars. Devotion to Acutis, in particular, extended to a wide range of merchandise on sale bearing his image, including action figures, T-shirts, mobile phone stickers and handheld fans. Leo, dressed in golden vestments, said before the Mass: “I’m happy to see so many young people.”
Over the past year, more than 1 million people have flocked to the central Italian town of Assisi, where Acutis’s body – covered in a wax mould of his likeness and dressed in his blue tracksuit top, jeans and trainers – is on view behind a glass-panelled case in Santa Maria Maggiore church. His heart is in a gold casket in the town’s San Rufino Cathedral, while pieces of tissue from his pericardium – the membrane enclosing the heart – have toured the world in the lead-up to his canonisation. A bronze lifesize statue of him is also on display in the town.
His mother, Antonia Salzano, has also travelled across the globe, delivering speeches to Catholic communities about her son’s life, bringing strands of her son’s hair as gifts.
She was present at the canonisation Mass with her family, including Carlo’s two teenage siblings who were born after his death. His brother Michele did a reading.
Salzano told the Guardian the family was not particularly religious, but her son showed a deep devotion to the Catholic faith from a young age. “He would go to mass and do the rosary each day,” she said, adding that he was a child who “could not be indifferent to sorrow”. “We lived in the centre of Milan in a building surrounded by beggars. He wanted to help them, speak to them, bring them food and blankets.”
She added that Acutis was otherwise an average child, hanging out with friends or playing sports. “Carlo was an internet geek, but he had the temperance to use technology for good, and was not exploited by it,” she said.
Acutis was born on 3 May 1991 in London to a wealthy but not particularly observant Catholic family. They moved back to Milan soon after he was born.
Acutis was particularly interested in computer science and devoured college-level books on programming even as a youngster. A skilful coder, his whiz-kid reputation started to grow when he created websites for Catholic organisations, including one that listed miracles, earning him the moniker “cyber apostle”. He also enjoyed playing on his PlayStation, although limited its use to an hour a week – a discipline that has proved appealing to a Catholic hierarchy that has often warned about the dangers of a technology-steered world.
In October 2006, at age 15, he fell ill with what was quickly diagnosed as acute leukaemia. Within days, he was dead. He was entombed in Assisi, known for its association with another popular saint, St Francis.
The movement that had built up around Acutis was evident from the day he died, as seriously ill people began praying to him for cures. His funeral was attended by a host of people he had helped, among them immigrants and bullied children.
His mother claims it was around the time of his funeral that he started to work miracles, and last year Francis credited Acutis with two. The first involved the recovery of a boy in Brazil from a rare congenital disease affecting his pancreas; the second was the healing of a student in Florence with bleeding on the brain from a head trauma, and whose mother had prayed at Acutis’s tomb in Assisi.
The speed at which Acutis has been canonised, especially compared with Frassati, shows how keen the church is to attract more young people.
Canonisation usually follows a long and detailed process, involving a meticulous investigation by the Vatican and outside specialists who determine the veracity of miracles attributed to the individual. Acutis’s beatification, the stage before canonisation, was carried out by Pope Francis in 2020.
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