Pope Leo canonizes ‘God’s Influencer’ St Carlo

Anthony Faiola, Stefano Pitrelli 

Tens of thousands of worshipers filled St. Peter’s Square on Sunday for the canonization of the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint, a London-born computer whiz who played Super Mario as well as read the Bible.

In some ways, Carlo Acutis was a boy like any other. In other ways, his family says, he was always different.

Raised in Milan by a prominent Italian Catholic family until his death from leukemia in 2006 at age 15, he spoke his first word at 3 months, his mother says, and could speak clearly before he was half a year old.

As a child, she said, Acutis became fascinated with the mystery of the Eucharist - the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. While other children played soccer or dated, Acutis would conduct exhaustive research on miraculous events linked to the Holy Host.

He called the wafer a “highway to heaven.”

“When he was 9 years old, he was not like a 9-year-old normal child,” Antonia Salzano, Acutis’s mother, told The Washington Post. “No, he was like an old person with this intuition. He had received special skills from God.”

The making of a modern saint is a boon to a church that has sometimes struggled to connect with youths and that in Acutis finds an identifiable, tech-savvy, video game-loving boy (who nevertheless is said to have limited himself to one hour a week of video games). Acutis’s road to sainthood ranks among the fastest in modern history, and his popularity among the faithful has exploded - luring many thousands to glimpse his remains in Assisi, the Italian city famous as the home of Saint Francis.

On Sunday, the throng of the faithful - including school groups and youth from across the globe - packed St. Peter’s Square for the canonization Mass. “Today is a wonderful day for all of Italy, for the whole Church, for the whole world,” Pope Leo XIV declared.

In Catholic catechism classrooms from Chicago to Rome, Acutis is emerging as a rock star saint. He largely predated the era of TikTok, Twitter and even Facebook and was no social media maven. But Pope Francis, who championed his cause and saw him as motivational for Catholic youths, dubbed Acutis: “God’s Influencer.”

“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, obsessed with our free time, caught up in negativity,” Francis said in 2019. “Yet he knew how to use the new communications technology to transmit the Gospel, to communicate values and beauty.”

Acutis’s original canonization ceremony had been scheduled for April 27 but was postponed following Francis’s death.

On Sunday, Acutis, along with another Italian - Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died in 1925 - became the first saints canonized by the new American pope. Choruses of hymns and chants of the Litany of the Saints filled the square as Leo, adorned in gold vestments, presided. Two elaborate vessels containing relics of Acutis - a piece of his heart - and Frassati rested on a covered platform.

“We enroll them among the saints, decreeing they shall be venerated by all the church,” Leo said. Acutis’s mother, attending the canonization in a black veil, wept.

“We like him because he’s young and a source of inspiration for us,” said Cristiano Zamporri, 13, a student from Milan who wore an Acutis scarf around his neck. “I was amazed at how, in a world running so fast, he managed to give his testimony of God.”

The young man’s rapid rise to sainthood, a process than can take decades, or even centuries, has also generated skeptics within the faith.

Even his supporters note that Acutis’s cause enjoyed special advantages, including being the son of an extremely wealthy Italian family that had influence within the Vatican and had made contributions to the church. Acutis’s father and paternal grandfather are major insurance industry executives. Before his death, Acutis’s mother became the curator of a Vatican committee on martyrs. Acutis also had two previous saints in his family tree.

“Antonia had a direct relationship with the Holy See,” said Antonio Gaspari, a Catholic journalist and longtime family friend. “She was quite an independent donor and was never asking for anything back.”

Gaspari first met Acutis when the boy was 11 and described “remarkable” conversations with him during a Catholic conference. He said Acutis was always “extraordinary” and believes he would have been canonized regardless of the family’s influence. “He was profound,” Gaspari said.

Others, however, find the Vatican’s fervent embrace of Acutis part of a campaign that seemed to border on secular marketing.

“He has the profile of a young devout boy with traits that are not particularly meaningful, except for those that have to do with his dedication to the Eucharist and prayer,” said Andrea Grillo, a Rome-based Catholic theologian. “The speed is unusual and surely due to the organization of those who patronized the cause.”

Nicola Gori, the Vatican postulator - a sort of saint investigator - on the Acutis case, who was handpicked by Salzano to write a book on the boy’s life, emphatically denied that. “This is completely untrue,” Gori said. “The whole process would have been the same had he been poor. It’s the same for everyone. It wasn’t sped up because there was money involved. If there hadn’t been a fame of sanctity, it would have come to a stop.”

Salzano took umbrage with criticisms of the campaign and pushed back at allegations in a March Economist article that questioned whether her son had truly evangelized the faith among his friends.

“If you want to see the truth, you have to see all the witnesses, all the priests that saw Carlo each day in Mass, each day to do a Eucharistic adoration,” she said, “the people that were helped [by] Carlo. The church did an inquiry, a very serious inquiry. The church is not so easy to open a process of canonization.”

His mother, one of his former teachers and others who knew him or researched his past paint a picture of a child who nudged some of those he met, including his own parents - who were Catholic, but initially not particularly observant - closer to the faith.

Salzano described her son as surprisingly devout at a young age and with a personality rooted in kindness. He took to distributing his allowance to the homeless and needy people in Milan.

His fascination with the Eucharist became the core of his cause for sainthood. He scoured online for information about a highly esoteric subject: miracles associated with the holy wafer, she said. With the aid of his parents, he went to libraries and other religious centers in search of information on specific cases. He assembled a catalogue and presentation that ultimately became a traveling exhibition and was disseminated globally online after his death.

Fabrizio Zaggia, 57, a religion teacher at the Leone XIII school of Milan who taught Acutis, described him as “the saint next door.” He recalled him as filled with questions but, above all, kind.

“He didn’t quote from the Bible or theological discourses, but he would see his classmate a little isolated during recess, go to him, and spend time with him,” Zaggia said. “There was the kid who was having trouble studying, and he would invite him home, or make himself available to help him out.”

Acutis died in October 2006 after short battle with leukemia. His enormous funeral at the Santa Maria Segreta Church in Milan, observers say, generated a scent of sanctity.

Inside, it was standing room only. Spillover crowds gathered in the streets. “Among these people, there were beggars, foreigner people, we had Muslims, we had Sikhs, because Carlo was a friend of all these people he had met in his life, especially when he used to do charity work,” Salzano said.

A cause for sainthood cannot officially begin until five years after death. A local bishop must establish the heroic virtues of a candidate. Witnesses are called and evidence examined. After being passed to the Vatican, the process involves several more requirements, including research by an official postulator, and two proven miracles.

In Acutis’s case, he was beatified - an initial step to sainthood that can occur following one miracle - in 2020 after a boy in Brazil was said to be healed of an annular pancreas after his mother prayed to Acutis. Then, on July 8, 2022, a daughter of a Costa Rican woman was said to have recovered from a traumatic brain injury after she prayed at Acutis’s tomb in Assisi.

Veneration of Acutis, according to Archbishop Domenico Sorrentino of Assisi, has appeared to awaken something in Catholic youths.

“We are amazed not only by what’s happening in Assisi, but also [among] people from all over the world,” Sorrentino said. “There are so many young people who come, who are approaching or re-approaching the faith.”