Carlo Acutis will become the Catholic Church's first millennial saint at a solemn canonization Mass on April 27 in St. Peter's Square. But throngs of pilgrims are already flocking to the church in Assisi, Italy, where his body wearing sneakers, jeans and a sweatshirt lies in a shrine.
Here’s more on the teenage boy who’s generating uncommon devotion.
Carlo Acutis was born on May 3, 1991, in London to a wealthy Italian family, and grew up in Milan. His precocious faith journey took off after he received First Communion at the young age of 7, and he regularly attended daily Mass, prayed the rosary and participated in eucharistic adoration.
While he enjoyed regular pastimes for his age — hiking, video games, and joking around with friends – he also taught catechism in a local parish and did outreach to the homeless.
Acutis used his computer savvy to create an online exhibit about more than 100 eucharistic miracles recognized by the church over many centuries, focused on the real presence of Christ that Catholics believe is in the consecrated bread and wine.
In October 2006, at age 15, he fell ill. Ten days later, he died of acute leukemia at a hospital in northern Italy. His body was later transferred to an Assisi cemetery as Acutis had asked, because of his devotion to the hometown medieval saint, St. Francis.
His road to sainthood — the canonization process — started more than 10 years ago at the initiative of a group of priests and friends, and formally took off shortly after Pope Francis began his 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 Assisi’s Santuario della Spogliazione, a major site linked to St. Francis' life.
He was then declared “blessed” in 2020 after the Vatican dicastery that studies sainthood processes recognized a miraculous healing through Acutis’ intercession — a child in Brazil who recovered in a “scientifically inexplainable” manner.
Last year, the church paved his way to sainthood by attributing to him a second miracle — the complete healing of a Costa Rican student in Italy from major head trauma in a bicycle accident after her mother prayed at Acutis’ tomb.
Acutis' canonization Mass will be Sunday, April 27, at 10:30 a.m. in front of the Vatican's St. Peter Basilica, in conjunction with the celebration of the Holy Year's jubilee for teens.
The Rev. Domenico Sorrentino, Assisi's bishop, said that over the last year, a million pilgrims made their way to Acutis’ shrine in this medieval hilltop town in central Italy.
Images of Acutis, usually portraying him with a backpack and smiling broadly, are in shops all over town, from pocket-sized cards to statuettes. A religious souvenir shop near the Vatican recently displayed in its window a near-life-sized statue of Acutis next to one of Mother Teresa of Kolkata.
To many pilgrims, the draw is Acutis’ relatability as a teen of this time.
“It’s amazing this saint, a young person — we can propose him to our people to imitate because everybody can be a saint,” said Rev. Jacinto Bento, a Portuguese priest who was leading a group of 30 jubilee pilgrims from the Azores islands to Assisi earlier this month.
The same day, Tomaso Barbon of Treviso, in northern Italy, was visiting the shrine with his wife and three children, two of them teens.
“He appears like one of our kids,” Barbon said of Acutis. “A special prayer to him is really welcome.”
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