Meet St. Carlo Acutis The Millenial Saint

A teenager in Nikes who loved Pokémon and played PlayStation doesn’t fit the traditional image of a saint. But on September 7, 2025, Carlo Acutis was canonized as the first millennial saint in the Catholic Church. Both in his short lifetime and after his death, Carlo’s seemingly “ordinary” piety has attracted followers online and led pilgrims to travel en masse to his burial site in Assisi. Though Pope Francis approved Carlo for sainthood, it was fitting that Pope Leo XIV formally canonized Carlo: the saint’s prescient words on technology mirror some of Pope Leo’s early comments on the uses of artificial intelligence on the global stage.

Born in 1991 to a wealthy family in London, Carlo Acutis spent most of his childhood in Milan. In many ways, his childhood was typical for his generation: he had a regular group of friends and enjoyed playing video games. Realizing that some of his friends were addicted to their screens, Carlo restricted his video game time to one hour a week. He also volunteered at a local soup kitchen and regularly gave money and aid to the poor in his community. Though his parents weren’t religious, Carlo was moved by stories of the Eucharist and St. Francis of Assisi. His devotion to Francis was so significant that he requested that family vacations include visits to the Basilica of St. Francis. Carlo attended Mass regularly, and the passionate way he spoke about his faith led to the family housekeeper’s conversion and his parents’ eventual return to the Church.

By fourteen, Carlo had already taught himself computer coding, and his parish priest asked him to design a website for their parish. Combining his talents and an increasingly popular technology for the benefit of his fellow Catholics, Carlo soon began work on the defining project of his life: an online repository of Eucharistic miracles. Insisting that “the Eucharist is the highway to heaven,” Carlo spent over two years cataloging nearly 200 miracle stories on a website that he launched just weeks before he passed away.

In October 2006, when Carlo was fifteen, he fell gravely ill and was diagnosed with leukemia. Within a week of his diagnosis, he passed away. Even those who didn’t know him attended the funeral in Milan, queuing up to pay respects to the young teenager who spoke so lovingly about Jesus and the Eucharist. Carlo was later buried in Assisi because he spoke of his desire to be buried close to St. Francis. As social media became more popular, Carlo’s life got more and more attention: Facebook pages were dedicated to him and the story of the Catholic coder spread worldwide. Even before Carlo gained any formal status in the Church on the path to sainthood, people viewed him as an intercessor and prayed for miraculous intervention.

The first miracle that paved the way for Carlo’s beatification happened in 2013. A four-year-old boy in Brazil had difficulty eating due to a pancreatic illness. His mother prayed to Carlo for intercession and even visited a church in Brazil that housed a second-class relic of Carlo’s: a piece of his t-shirt. The child later asked for solid food and began to eat comfortably for the first time. Carlo’s beatification took place in October 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic. During his homily for Carlo’s beatification ceremony at the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, Cardinal Agostino Vallini, the papal legate for Assisi, remarked that Carlo viewed the internet “as a place to use with responsibility, without becoming enslaved.” The livestreamed Mass furthered global interest in the millennial teenager, causing many young people to flock to Assisi to see the embalmed boy dressed in jeans and sneakers.

Because many of Carlo’s contemporaries are still alive, his cause for canonization has looked different from those from centuries past. Most causes rely on written materials, such as journal entries, letters, and medical records, and even exhumations of the candidate’s body. In Carlo’s case, his family and classmates were interviewed. His mother, Antonia Salzano Acutis, has been one of the main advocates for his cause, giving speaking engagements and media interviews, commissioning artists to create prayer cards bearing his image, and discussing the posthumous miracles that shaped his path to sainthood. Others have promoted Carlo’s story in ways accessible to younger generations: comic books, videogames, and even a version of his life told in a short Lego film.

The second verified miracle happened in 2022, after a Costa Rican woman suffered a brain hemorrhage in a cycling accident in Florence. Her mother visited Carlo’s tomb in Assisi, and the woman recovered without permanent damage. Once the Dicastery for the Causes approved the miracle, Pope Francis announced that he had cleared the path for sainthood. While the average saint is canonized 262 years after their death, Carlo’s canonization was comparatively quick—just nineteen years after his passing. When discussing Carlo’s upcoming canonization, Pope Francis touted Carlo’s coding abilities as central to his faith: “Since he was very good at getting around on the internet, he used it in the service of the Gospel, spreading love for prayer, the witness of faith and charity toward others.” It is remarkable and new, not just that web design was a major part of Carlo’s life but that the Catholic Church praised it as an integral aspect of his sanctity.

Just as web design was an integral part of Carlo’s life, much of Pope Leo’s pastoral life has been intertwined with advances in technology. In the early 2000s, when the Order of St. Augustine lacked an online presence, it was a young Robert Prevost (then the prior general of the religious order) who designed their first website. Pope Leo XIV is the first pope with an extensive digital footprint prior to ascending to the papacy. When he chose his papal name on May 8, 2025, many noted the connection to Pope Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum (“On New Things”) warned that the Industrial Revolution was stripping workers of dignity through inhumane conditions and unfair wages. Two days after his election, Pope Leo XIV spoke about artificial intelligence in one of his first public addresses to the College of Cardinals: “Today, the Church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor.”

Children’s words about their faith can cause a groundswell of inspiration. The young children who bore witness to the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Fátima, Portugal, in 1917 led to a massive number of pilgrimages to the town. Over a century later, it remains one of the most visited Christian sites in the world. With over five million people expected to visit Assisi this year, it appears that Carlo is having a similar effect in the twenty-first century. This time, though, we aren’t witnessing the making of a saint from the distant past, sifting through frescoes and text fragments to learn more about them. Instead, we have an online platform and archival video footage of their life to bring us closer to them and offer an opportunity to learn from their devotion. One of Carlo’s most-repeated sayings (Pope Francis even cited it in a 2019 apostolic exhortation) was, “We are all born as originals, but many of us die as photocopies.” This sentiment aligns with Pope Leo’s statements on artificial intelligence: we must not allow our use of technology to make us less than what we are.