ROME — Carlo Acutis wore sneakers and jeans, relaxed with his PlayStation, craved Nutella, and loved soccer. On Sunday, the Italian teenager will become the Catholic Church’s first saint from the internet generation.
Carlo, a self-taught computer whiz whose devotion to his faith was unusual for his age, died of leukemia in 2006 at just 15.
To friends and classmates, he was a well-liked fan of the AC Milan soccer team who would sometimes vanish for hours at a time to write computer code.
To fellow parishioners of Milan’s Santa Maria Segreta — St. Mary the Hidden — he was a boy who never missed a daily Mass, prayed the rosary, and who spoke about heaven as if he had firsthand knowledge.
“In most ways, Carlo was a regular child who didn’t stand out,” his mother, Antonia Salzano, told The Washington Times from Milan. “He liked school and had many friends. But he was also very dedicated to helping people find their faith. That was what made him so special.”
At his request, Carlo was buried in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Assisi, the Italian city is best known as the birthplace of St. Francis, the 13th-century founder of the Franciscan order and a saint whom Carlo admired (as well as the namesake of the previous pope, who got the ball rolling on the boy’s canonization).
After Carlo’s death, his story spread. A website he designed to catalog Eucharistic miracles and multiple languages began to draw worldwide attention.
Italian media called him “God’s Influencer,” a nickname that, the Catholic Church says, turned out to be more literal than thought. Becoming a Catholic saint requires at least two verified miracles attributed to a person’s intercession.
Pope Francis declared him “Venerable Carlo Acutis” in 2018 and “Blessed” in 2020, after a 4-year-old Brazilian boy with a rare pancreatic disease was healed after his family prayed to Carlo.
A second miracle was recognized last year. In 2022, a 21-year-old Costa Rican university student studying in Florence was hospitalized after suffering a severe head injury in a cycling accident. She was in critical condition and given a low chance of survival.
The student’s mother prayed at Carlo’s tomb in Assisi and within days, the hemorrhage vanished. Medical experts could find no scientific explanation for the recovery and last year the Vatican certified it as miraculous.
On Sunday, Pope Leo XIV will lead the mass before tens of thousands of faithful in St. Peter’s Square that will canonize him as St. Carlo.
He will join a small group of modern child saints.
Jose Sanchez del Rio, a 14-year-old Mexican boy, was canonized in 2016. He was executed by anti-church government forces during Mexico’s Cristero War in 1928 rather than renounce Catholicism.
A year later, Pope Francis declared two of the shepherd children of Fatima, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, as saints.
Francisco and Jacinta were among the three children who reported being visited by the Virgin Mary six times in 1917 at Fatima, which became one of the most important Marian shrines in the world to this day. The two boys died of Spanish flu a few years later.
But unlike them, Carlo was neither a martyr nor a visionary, but rather a typical 21st-century teenager who found holiness in everyday life.
He was born in London in 1991 to two well-off Italian parents, neither of them especially devout at the time, though his mother has said his holiness brought her back to the church.
The family employed nannies and other servants, often immigrants, and the boy Carlo’s talking to them about Jesus and Christianity reportedly persuaded two of them, plus one of their family members, to be baptized.
His earliest religious inclinations reportedly came at about age three when, shortly after seeing his grandfather receive the Last Rites, he asked to go to church to pray for his grandfather who “had gone to see Jesus.”
As a tween, the self-described computer geek set up his parish’s website, then later a volunteering site, and finally the Eucharistic and Apparitions site on which Carlo worked the rest of his short life.
Eucharistic Miracles of the World was unveiled on Oct. 4, 2006, on the feast day of St. Francis, after two years of work, though Carlo was too sick to attend the public unveiling. The site remains up today in almost 20 languages.
His death was sudden. The first sign that anything was wrong — an inflammation of the throat — came on Oct. 1, 2006. By the 12th, he was dead.
According to his mother, his last words to her were, “Mom, don’t be afraid. Since Jesus became a man, death has become the passage towards life, and we don’t need to flee it. Let us prepare ourselves to experience something extraordinary in the eternal life.”
When Carlo’s body was exhumed in 2019 ahead of his beatification, reports spread that his body was “incorrupt,” meaning it had not decayed. But the Catholic Church has since clarified that while his remains were well preserved, it was treated with special preservation techniques including a silicone mask.
Today, pilgrims in Assisi can see him through a glass barrier, lying in his tomb dressed in a sweatshirt, jeans, and scuffed-up Nike sneakers.
Bishop Domenico Sorrentino of Assisi said it was fitting that Carlo is smiling in his tomb, which he called a sign of the joy of eternal life with God.
“When we are convinced that we are saved by Jesus, we can only be joyful,” Bishop Sorrentino told Italian television.
