Carlo Acutis, the late computer-programming Italian teenager known as “God’s Influencer,” will become the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint. Pope Francis and the College of Cardinals approved Acutis’s canonization on Monday, the Vatican News announced. He will likely be proclaimed a saint during the 2025 Jubilee. Acutis, a devout Catholic, was born in London in 1991 and was a talented computer programmer and graphic designer from a young age. He designed a website cataloging more than 150 Eucharistic miracles around the world, which has gone on to be displayed at thousands of parishes across five continents, the Catholic News Agency reported. “Computer genius, Carlo made his computer an instrument at the service of God and the Internet a way to evangelize, spreading his love for the Holy Eucharist,” the website of the 2023 World Youth Day in Lisbon, Portugal, said.
Before becoming a saint in the Catholic Church, a person must first be declared “venerable” and then beatified or declared “blessed.” Acutis was declared venerable by Francis in 2018, a recognition that he had lived a life of “heroic virtue.” Beatification, the next step in the process of sainthood, requires a miracle to have been attributed to a person. Acutis was beatified in 2020 after reportedly healing a young Brazilian boy from a birth defect affecting his pancreas in 2013, seven years after Acutis’s death. Francis attributed a second miracle to Acutis in May, clearing the way for his canonization. Acutis reportedly healed a young woman suffering from a head injury as a result of a bicycle accident in 2022 after the woman’s mother prayed for her recovery at the late teenager’s tomb in Assisi, Italy. Acutis’s mother, Antonia Salzano, described her son as a “sign of hope” to CNN in May. “[With] all the media, the technologies, it seems sometimes that holiness is something that belongs to the past,” she said. “Instead, holiness is also something nowadays in this modern time.” Acutis loved playing video games such as Halo, Super Mario, and Pokemon, CNN reported. He died of acute promyelocytic leukemia in 2006 at 15 years old.
