An Italian teenager called “God’s Influencer” is to become the first millennial Catholic saint at a ceremony led by Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican.
Tens of thousands of worshippers are expected to attend Sunday’s canonisation in St Peter’s Square of Carlo Acutis, who died of leukaemia in 2006 at the age of 15.
Born in London, England, in 1991 to Italian parents, Carlo grew up in the northern Italian city of Milan, where he taught himself basic coding and used his computing talents to document miracles and other elements of the Catholic faith online.
The story of the cyber-apostle, who is said to have attended Mass daily and shown kindness to bullied children and homeless people, attracted Catholic youth worldwide, and it will now see him elevated to the same level as Francis of Assisi.
Dressed in jeans and a pair of Nike trainers, the teenager’s body lies in a glass-walled tomb in Assisi, a medieval city and pilgrimage site in the central region of Umbria, and is visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year.
The Vatican said Carlo has performed two miracles since his death, the first involving the healing of a Brazilian child suffering from a pancreatic malformation, the second involving the recovery of a Costa Rican student injured in an accident. Relatives of both prayed for help from the teenager.
Carlo’s mother, Antonia Salzano, was cited by the AFP news agency as saying her son was possessed with the gift of seeing that “each person is unique and unrepeatable, originals and not photocopies”.
Sunday’s ceremony, initially set for April but postponed when Pope Francis died, will be a first for Leo, who will also canonise Pier Giorgio Frassati, a young Italian man who was known for helping those in need and died of polio in the 1920s.
It was Francis who had pushed the case for Carlo’s sainthood 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.
“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,” Francis wrote in a 2019 document.
“Yet he knew how to use the new communications technology to transmit the Gospel, to communicate values and beauty.”
Leo inherited the cause and has also pointed to technology, in particular artificial intelligence, as one of the main challenges facing humanity.
Carlo’s most well-known tech legacy is the website he created about so-called Eucharistic miracles, available in nearly 20 languages.
The site compiles information about the 196 seemingly inexplicable events over the history of the Catholic Church related to the Eucharist, which the faithful believe is the body of Christ.
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