‘God’s influencer’ Carlo Acutis to become first millennial saint

At a Vatican ceremony led by Pope Leo XIV, an Italian teenager known as “God’s Influencer” will become the first millennial Catholic saint.

Carlo Acutis, who passed away from leukaemia in 2006 at the age of 15, is to be buried in St Peter’s Square on Sunday.

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Carlo was born in London, England, in 1991, to Italian parents. He used his computer skills to record online miracles and other aspects of the Catholic faith.

Catholic youth around the world were drawn to the story of the cyberapostle, who is alleged to have attended Mass daily and shown kindness to bullied children and homeless people. He will now have his status at the same level as Francis of Assisi.

The teenager’s body is found in a glass-walled tomb in Assisi, a medieval city and pilgrimage site in the central region of Umbria, in jeans and a pair of Nike trainers, and is surrounded by tens of thousands of people annually.

Carlo, according to the Vatican, has performed two miracles since his death, the first of which was the recovery of a Costa Rican student who had suffered a pancreatic malformation. Both parents pleaded with the teenager for assistance.

The mother of Carlo, Antonia Salzano, claimed that her son had the ability to see that “every person is unique and unrepeatable, originals and not photocopies,” according to the AFP news agency.

Leo will celebrate the anniversary of Pier Giorgio Frassati, an Italian man who was known for helping those in need and passed away from polio in the 1920s with a ceremony scheduled for April, which was later postponed due to Pope Francis’ death.

Carlo’s sainthood was brought forward by Francis because he believed the church needed a person like him to convert young Catholics to the faith while addressing the benefits and drawbacks of the digital era.

In a 2019 document, Francis wrote, “Carlo was well aware that the entire apparatus of communications, advertising, and social networking can be used to lull us, to make us addicted to consumerism and to buying the most recent thing on the market.”

He was aware of how to communicate values and beauty using the new communication technology.

Leo inherited the cause, and he also cited artificial intelligence as one of humanity’s greatest challenges.

The website about alleged Eucharistic miracles that Carlo founded is his most well-known tech legacy, which is available in nearly 20 different languages.