Carlo Acutis: The ‘saint next door’ inspiring a new generation of Catholics
The London-born computer prodigy will be canonised on Sunday
Carlo Acutis, a British-born computer prodigy who died in 2006 at the age of 15, is poised to become the Catholic Church's first millennial saint this Sunday.
His impending canonisation has sparked a remarkable surge in popularity among young Catholics globally, who view him as a relatable 'digital disciple' for the modern age.
This widespread appeal is partly due to a concerted campaign by the Vatican, aiming to provide the next generation of the faithful with a contemporary role model who harnessed his technological talents to spread the faith.
Carlo has achieved a near rockstar-like status, a level of global engagement the Church has not witnessed in decades.
In Chicago, the Blessed Carlo Acutis Parish and school, the first in the United States to bear his name, is fully immersed in his story.
Fifth graders at a Catholic school in Pope Leo XIV’s hometown read comic books about his life entitled Digital Disciple, and discuss the miracles attributed to his intercession.
The Reverend Ed Howe, pastor at the Chicago parish, noted that Carlo is not a global figure like Mother Teresa but rather a "saint next door".
He added: "He’s someone who I think a lot of young people today say, ‘I could be the saint next door.'"
Pope Leo XIV's first canonisation
Leo, a Chicago native, will declare Carlo a saint on Sunday in his first canonisation ceremony, alongside another popular Italian, Pier Giorgio Frassati.
Both ceremonies had been scheduled for earlier this year but were postponed following the death in April of Pope Francis.
It was Francis who had fervently willed the Carlo sainthood case forward, convinced that the church needed someone like him to attract young Catholics to church while addressing the promises and perils of the digital age.
Carlo was precociously savvy with computers before the social media era, reading college-level textbooks on programming and coding as a youngster.
However, he 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.
“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, but he too has pointed to technology — especially artificial intelligence — as one of the main challenges facing humanity.
The ordinary and the extraordinary
For his admirers, Carlo was an ordinary kid who did extraordinary things, a typical Milan teen who went to school, played soccer and loved animals.
But he also brought food to the poor, attended Mass daily and got his less-than-devout parents back to church.
“When I read his story for the first time, it was just like shocking to me because from a very early age he was just really drawn to Jesus Christ and he would go to Mass all the time,” said Sona Harrison, an 8th grader at the St. John Berchmans’ school, which is part of the Acutis parish.
“I feel like he’s a lot more relatable and I definitely feel like I’m closer to God when I read about him.”
The teen earned the nickname “God’s Influencer” because he used technology to spread the faith. His most well-known tech legacy is the website he created about so-called Eucharistic miracles, available in nearly 20 different languages.
The site compiles information about the 196 seemingly inexplicable events over the history of the church related to the Eucharist, which the faithful believe is the body of Christ.
He was known to spend hours in prayer before the Eucharist each day, a practice known as Eucharistic adoration.
“This was the fixed appointment of his day,” his mother, Antonia Salzano, said in a documentary that was airing Friday night at the U.S. seminary in Rome.
Who was Carlo Acutis?
Carlo was born on May 3, 1991, in London to Salzano and Andrea Acutis — a wealthy but not particularly observant Catholic family.
They moved back to Milan soon after he was born and he enjoyed a typical, happy childhood, albeit marked by his increasingly intense religious devotion.
In October 2006, at age 15, he fell ill with what was quickly diagnosed as acute leukemia. Within days he was dead. He was entombed in Assisi, which known for its association with another popular saint, St. Francis.
In a remarkably quick process, Carlo was beatified in 2020 and in 2024, Francis approved the second miracle needed for him to be made a saint.
In the years since his death, young Catholics have flocked by the millions to Assisi, where through a glass-sided tomb they can see the young Carlo, dressed in jeans, Nike sneakers and a sweatshirt, his hands clasped around a Rosary.
Those who can’t make it in person can watch the comings and goings on a webcam pointed at his tomb, a level of Internet accessibility not afforded to even popes buried in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame, said his enormous popularity was clearly the result of a concerted church campaign, pushed strongly by his grief-stricken mother.
But she said that is nothing new, and that in the 2,000-year history of the church, saints have very often been pushed ahead to respond to a particular need at a particular time.
“It doesn’t detract from the holiness of the person being honored to say that there are choices that are made,” about which cases move forward, she said in a telephone interview.
Sprows Cummings said the Carlo phenomenon caught on because he is attractive to both young people and the institutional church, because he used technology in a positive way to spread his profound belief in Eucharistic miracles at a time when many Catholics don’t believe that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist.
“Canonisation is about marketing,” said Sprows Cummings, author of A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics become American.
“Which stories are going to get told? Who is going to get remembered through this amazingly efficient way of remembering holy people?”
Carlo and his story are ever-present here. During Mass this week ahead of the canonisation, students processed into the chapel under an Acutis banner carrying things he might have had: a soccer ball, laptop and knapsack.
Howe, the parish pastor and priest of the Congregation of the Resurrection, pulled items out of the knapsack to explain Carlo’s story to the youngest students seated up front: A can of food he might have given to a homeless person, a set of Rosary beads he might have prayed with.
The message landed.
“He fed the poor, he cared for the poor,” said 9-year-old David Cameron, who called Carlo “a great man.”
Cameron, a fan of Sonic, Minecraft and Halo, also found inspiration in Carlo’s love of video games, and awe at his restraint.
“He played video games for like only one hour a week, which I don’t think I can do,” he said.
