Rome — A 15-year-old Italian web designer is set to become the Catholic Church's first millennial saint. On Monday, Pope Francis and cardinals living in Rome formally approved the canonization of Carlo Acutistogether with 14 others.
No specific date has yet been set for the canonization of Acutis, who has been called “God's influential man” for his efforts to spread Catholicism online. However, he is likely to be canonized in 2025.
Monday's consistory was merely a formality, as Acutis' canonization case had already been thoroughly investigated and approved by the Vatican Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. The first announcement came in May.
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Acutis was born in London in 1991 to wealthy Italian parents, but the family moved to northern Italy shortly after his birth. His family has said he was a devout child, and asked to receive his first communion at the age of 7.
He went to church and received communion every day. As he grew older, he became interested in computers and the Internet. He created a website cataloging church-approved miracles and apparitions of the Virgin Mary throughout history.
According to the Vatican, Acutis was “welcoming and caring to the poorest, and he helped the homeless, the needy and immigrants with the money he saved from his weekly allowance.”
He reportedly used his early savings to buy a sleeping bag for a homeless man he often encountered on his way to mass.
Acutis died of leukemia in October 2006 at the age of 15 in Monza, Italy. Some of the city's poorest residents, whom Acutis had helped, showed up to pay their respects to the teenager at his funeral.
His body lies in an open tomb in Assisi, in central Italy, wearing blue jeans and Nike sneakers.
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“I am happy to die because I lived my life without wasting a minute of it on anything that does not please God,” Acutis said before he died.
Pope Francis declared Acutis “blessed” in October 2020, after a miracle attributed to him was approved by the church. That miracle was a young boy in Brazil who was healed of a fatal pancreatic disease after he and his mother prayed to him a remnant of Acutis.
In order to be canonized, a second miracle—this one posthumous—had to be approved. It happened in 2022, when a woman prayed at Acutis’s grave for her daughter, who had fallen from her bicycle in Florence just six days earlier, causing severe head trauma.
She needed a craniotomy and had a very low chance of survival, according to doctors. On the day of the mother's pilgrimage to the tomb of Acutis, the daughter began to breathe spontaneously. Only a few days later, the hemorrhage had completely disappeared.
Along with Acutis, the canonizations of fourteen other people were approved on Monday, including eleven people killed in Syria in 1860 during the Syrian civil war, which left thousands of Christians dead.
