Millions of young Catholics flock to the small central Italian town of Assisi every year to pay tribute to Carlo Acutis – the Italian teenager informally known as “God’s Influencer.”
The 15-year-old computer whiz became the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint on Sunday, giving the next generation of Catholics a relatable role model who used technology to spread the faith.
Pope Leo XIV canonized Acutis, who died in 2006, during an open-air Mass in St. Peter’s Square before an estimated 80,000 people, many of them millennials and couples with young children. Leo also canonized another popular Italian figure who died young, Pier Giorgio Frassati.
Leo said both men created “masterpieces” out of their lives by dedicating them to God.
“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.”
Who was Carlo Acutis?
Acutis was born on May 3, 1991, in London to a wealthy Italian family. They moved back to Milan soon after he was born, and according to reports, he enjoyed a typical, happy childhood that was marked by his increasingly intense religious devotion.
An image of 15-year-old Carlo Acutis is seen during his beatification ceremony at the St. Francis Basilica in Assisi, Italy, in October 2020. / Credit: Gregorio Borgia / AP
He launched and managed a website for his local parish and later a Vatican-based academy. He also used his computer skills to create an online database of Eucharistic miracles around the world, available in nearly 20 languages. The site provides information about the 196 seemingly inexplicable events in the history of the church related to the Eucharist, which the faithful believe is the body of Christ.
“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,” the late Pope 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.”
Acutis 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 is airing Friday night at the U.S. seminary in Rome.
In October 2006, at age 15, he fell ill with what was quickly diagnosed as acute leukemia. He died in Monza, Italy, within days of his diagnosis. His body was entombed in Assisi and is on full display alongside other relics linked to him.
Fast track to sainthood
Dressed in jeans, Nike sneakers and a sweatshirt, with his hands clasped around a rosary, Acutis has generated a near rock star-like fame among young faithful the likes of which the Catholic Church hasn’t seen in ages.
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 even to popes buried in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Acutis’ path to sainthood began more than 10 years ago, initiated by a group of priests and friends, and formally took off shortly after Francis assumed the papacy in 2013.
Acutis was named “venerable” in 2018 after the church recognized his virtuous life, and his body was taken to a shrine in the Santuario della Spogliazione in Assisi, Italy. It was a significant site associated with St. Francis’ life.
The teenager was beatified in 2020 – the first step to sainthood – after Acutis was credited with healing a Brazilian child of a congenital disease affecting his pancreas.
Inside the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore Sanctuary of the Renunciation, the tomb of Blessed Carlo Acutis. / Credit: Grzegorz Galazka/Archivio Grzegorz Galazka/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images
Last year, Francis approved the second miracle needed for Acutis to be made a saint. The second miracle involved the healing of a university student in Florence who had a brain bleed after suffering head trauma in a bicycle accident.
Francis and the cardinals residing in Rome formally approved his canonization in July 2024.
The canonization – the first for Pope Leo XIV – was initially scheduled for earlier this year but was postponed following Francis’ death in April.
An appeal to the youth
For his admirers, Acutis 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,” Sona Harrison, an eighth grader at the St. John Berchmans’ school, which is part of the Blessed Carlo Acutis Parish in Chicago’s Northwest Side, told the Associated Press. “I feel like he’s a lot more relatable, and I definitely feel like I’m closer to God when I read about him.”
Students of St. John Berchmans’ school walk past a photo of Blessed Carlo Acutis after Mass at Blessed Carlo Acutis Parish, on Sept. 3, 2025, in Chicago. / Credit: Jessie Wardarski / AP
During Mass this week before the canonization, students processed into the chapel under an Acutis banner carrying things he might have carried: a soccer ball, a laptop and a knapsack.
“He fed the poor, he cared for the poor,” said 9-year-old David Cameron, who called Acutis “a great man.” Cameron, a fan of Sonic, Minecraft and Halo, also found inspiration in Acutis’ love of video games — and awe at Acutis’ restraint.
“He played video games for like only one hour a week, which I don’t think I can do,” he told the AP.
Matthew Schmalz, professor of religious studies at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, said Acutis’ canonization extends the church tradition of popular piety to the digital age.
“He becomes an emblem or model of how Catholics should approach and use the digital world–with discipline and with a focus on traditional Catholic spirituality that defies the passage of time,” he said in a statement. “He is a new saint of simplicity for the ever complex digital landscape of contemporary Catholicism.”
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 ordinary faithful alike.
Frassati, the other saint being canonized Sunday, lived from 1901-1925, when he died at age 24 of polio. He was born into a prominent Turin family but is known for his devotion to serving the poor and carrying out acts of charity while spreading his faith to his friends.
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