Carlo Acutis, who who died of leukaemia aged 15, became the first Catholic saint of the millennial generation on Sunday, in a Vatican ceremony led by Pope Leo and attended by thousands of young worshippers. The pope also canonised another popular Italian figure who died young, Pier Giorgio Frassati.
Pope Leo XIV has officially canonized Carlo Acutis, making him the first Catholic saint of the millennial generation. The ceremony took place yesterday during a mass in St. Peter’s Square, attended by tens of thousands of young faithful.
Acutis, a London-born Italian teenager who died of leukemia in 2006 at age 15, became renowned for blending his deep religious devotion with exceptional computer skills. Known affectionately as “God’s Influencer”, he created websites cataloguing Eucharistic miracles to promote the Catholic faith.
Pope Leo portrayed Acutis and fellow newly canonized Pier Giorgio Frassati as modern role models for youth, urging them to direct their lives purposefully and “make them masterpieces,” echoing the pope’s homily.
“The greatest risk in life is to waste it outside of God’s plan,” Leo said in his homily. The new saints “are an invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards and make them masterpieces”.
The Vatican said 36 cardinals, 270 bishops and hundreds of priests had signed up to celebrate the Mass along with Leo in a sign of the saints’ enormous appeal to the hierarchy and faithful alike.
Both ceremonies had been scheduled for earlier this year, but were postponed after Pope Francis’s death in April. Francis had fervently pushed Acutis’s sainthood case 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.
Over the past year, more than 1 million people have flocked to the central Italian town of Assisi, where Acutis’s body – covered in a wax mould of his likeness and dressed in his blue tracksuit top, jeans and trainers – is on view behind a glass-panelled case in Santa Maria Maggiore church. His heart is in a gold casket in the town’s San Rufino cathedral, while pieces of tissue from his pericardium – the membrane enclosing the heart – have toured the world in the lead-up to his canonisation.
Acutis’s tomb in Assisi, featuring a wax likeness of him dressed in contemporary clothes, has already become a pilgrimage site. His story continues to inspire a tech-savvy generation seeking spiritual resonance in the digital age.
