Carlo Acutis, nicknamed “God’s Influencer,” will be proclaimed the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint in a canonisation Mass led by Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican. Crowds numbering in the thousands are expected to gather in St Peter’s Square on Sunday to witness the elevation of the 15-year-old, who died of leukaemia in 2006.
Born in London in 1991 to Italian parents, Carlo spent his childhood in Milan, where he became passionate about technology. Largely self-taught, he learned coding and used his skills to create online archives of miracles and other aspects of Catholic tradition.
Known for his devotion to daily Mass and his kindness toward classmates and homeless people, Carlo came to be regarded as a model of faith for Catholic youth across the globe, exalting him to the same level as Francis of Assisi.
Acutis’s body, rests in a glass tomb in Assisi, dressed in jeans and Nike trainers. Assisi is a city of pilgrimage in Umbria, where it draws hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.
According to the Vatican, two miracles have been attributed to Carlo since his death: the cure of a Brazilian child with a pancreatic defect and the recovery of a Costa Rican student after a serious accident, both following prayers to him.
Antonia Salzano, Acutis’s mother, has said her son had the insight to see the uniqueness of each person.
The canonisation, initially planned for April but delayed by the death of Pope Francis, will also include Pier Giorgio Frassati, an Italian youth who dedicated his short life to aiding the poor before dying of polio in the 1920s.
It was Francis who advanced Carlo’s cause, believing the Church needed a figure who could inspire younger generations in a digital era.
“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,” he wrote in 2019. “Yet he knew how to use the new communications technology to transmit the Gospel, to communicate values and beauty.”
Leo has taken up that cause, highlighting artificial intelligence and other technologies as pressing concerns of modern times. Among Carlo’s lasting contributions is a multilingual website cataloguing 196 Eucharistic miracles reported throughout Church history, documenting what believers hold as signs of Christ’s presence in the sacrament.
