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Visit the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in the Italian town of Assisi, and you\u2019ll encounter the life-size cutout of a teen boy: the soon-to-be Saint Carlo Acutis. His real body, encased in wax, lies nearby in a brightly tiled coffin with a glass panel in the center. He\u2019s dressed as you might expect a kid his age would be, in jeans, a zip-up jacket, and Nikes. Stone panels behind the coffin depict scenes from his life with some symbolic flourishes. In one, the logos of Facebook, Google, and other internet companies float around him.<\/p>\n
Acutis, who is scheduled to be canonized on September 7, is unusual among saints. Born in London in 1991 and raised in Italy, he grew up with the internet\u2014playing video games, making websites\u2014and died at age 15, of leukemia. He\u2019s the first prospective saint to be entombed in branded gear. He\u2019s also the first Millennial.<\/p>\n
The Catholic Church has embraced Acutis\u2019s identity as an ordinary teen and internet user. \u201cThe digital world can expose you to the risk of self-absorption, isolation and empty pleasure,\u201d Pope Francis wrote in Christus Vivit<\/em>, a 2019 letter to young Catholics. \u201cBut don\u2019t forget that there are young people even there who show creativity and even genius.\u201d He pointed to Acutis as one example. Pope Leo also called on Acutis\u2019s legacy in a homily at the Jubilee of Young People this summer. Vatican representatives and news outlets have described Acutis as \u201ca computer genius,\u201d a \u201ctech-savvy teen,\u201d and \u201ca child of the Web and the digital age.\u201d As the rector of the shrine where Acutis\u2019s remains lie said in 2022, \u201cHis \u2018normality\u2019 attracts and is an example for many.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet there\u2019s another way to see Acutis. Sure, he played video games, but he limited himself to one hour a week\u2014not exactly typical kid behavior. He used his computer skills not to hang out in chat rooms or make goofy websites but to help his local parish and the Vatican with web design. He was apparently so fascinated by Eucharistic miracles\u2014stories about the bread that believers take at Communion transforming into human heart tissue or starting to bleed\u2014that he created an in-person exhibit and accompanying website about them. A movie about his life\u00a0 describes him as a \u201cteenage mystic,\u201d a term that harkens back to figures such as Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century abbess known for her trancelike visions. According to his mother, even before his leukemia diagnosis Acutis said he knew he would die young. Timothy P. O\u2019Malley, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame, said in a 2024 lecture, \u201cCarlo was weird.\u201d And recognizing that, O\u2019Malley suggested, is the key to \u201cunlocking his holiness.\u201d<\/p>\n To a certain extent, the tension in Acutis\u2019s story\u2014\u201cHe\u2019s just like us!\u201d but also, not like us\u2014is part of any sainthood campaign. But the diverging understandings of Acutis also speak to an urgent question for the Church, about how to reconcile certain of the faith\u2019s teachings with advances in science and technology. Some of the faithful resolve this conflict by rejecting the faith\u2019s more otherworldly elements; most Catholics in the United States, for example, don\u2019t believe in transubstantiation, which asserts that Communion bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Meanwhile, many of the most devout believers continue to embrace rituals that can seem out of place in the modern world. Still others fall somewhere in between.<\/p>\n Acutis has inspired devotion from both of these corners of the faith\u2014even when they seem to clash. He represents a Church at an uncertain juncture: a contemporary, technologically fluent teenager who was also deeply interested in stories about bread turning into flesh.<\/p>\n Compared with other recent saints, Acutis has had a singular level of posthumous fame. One Facebook group honoring him has more than 320,000 members. More than 1 million people are reported to have visited the shrine in person last year; even more have seen its livestream. In one TikTok video, a girl films herself crying as she visits his tomb. In another, she writes that Acutis \u201cchanged my life forever.\u201d A supposed lock of his hair sold online for 2,000 euros this year; the Catholic Church denounced the sale, but that hasn\u2019t stopped more unverified relics from popping up. A Chicago parish has been named after him.<\/p>\n Acutis is set to become a saint fewer than 20 years after his death, light speed for a Church that once mandated candidates wait five decades before their cases could be considered. Such velocity isn\u2019t unheard of, Carlo Nardella, a sociology professor at the University of Milan, told me\u2014but the exceptions are generally prominent figures such as Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II, not ordinary people like Acutis.<\/p>\n The success of the campaign to canonize Acutis seems to be the result of two forces: a concerted effort by his family\u2014a wealthy and powerful one\u2014to share his story, and the usefulness of his identity to the Church. After Acutis died, in 2006, his mother, Antonia Salzano, who works for a Vatican organization that promotes research on martyrs, devoted herself to giving talks and speaking with journalists about him and all the miracles she believed him responsible for. She also sent his exhibit on Eucharistic miracles to more than 500 parishes, the Catholic News Agency reporter Courtney Mares wrote in her book, Blessed Carlo Acutis: A Saint in <\/em>Sneakers<\/em>. By 2007, an official in Milan tasked with presenting cases for sainthood said Acutis was worth looking into. In 2011, a group of priests and loved ones formed an association to advocate for his cause, and by 2013, the inquiry into his life had officially begun.<\/p>\n Church leaders ultimately decide who becomes a saint. But campaigns for sainthood thrive on devotion from laypeople. A would-be saint needs to be proved responsible for two miracles, which happens only when enough people know about and pray to the candidate. A new population began to learn about Acutis when, in 2010, the Brazilian priest Marcelo Ten\u00f3rio heard of him from his godson and spread his story around the country. Ten\u00f3rio held services in his honor, mailed pamphlets to parishes, and befriended Salzano, who gave him a relic of Acutis\u2019s to exhibit. In 2013, a young boy with a malformed pancreas touched that relic at a church in S\u00e3o Sebasti\u00e3o, Brazil, and prayed that he would stop vomiting. According to the boy\u2019s family, he was eating normally when he got home that day.<\/p>\n In 2020, after the Church recognized the miracle, Acutis was beatified. Last year, the Church recognized a second miracle for Acutis, when a Costa Rican university student who was studying in Italy and suffering from severe head trauma said she was healed unexpectedly after her mother visited Acutis\u2019s tomb. It was official: Acutis would become a saint.<\/p>\n Acutis\u2019s story is a convenient one for the Church right now. His canonization is happening at a time when the Catholic population in the U.S. is rapidly aging. Catholicism \u201cneeds young people who are a good example of how to be devout,\u201d Massimo Faggioli, a professor of historical theology at Villanova University, told me, \u201cwithout being anti-modern, anti-society, anti-world.\u201d Acutis fits neatly in that niche.<\/p>\n The people I spoke with who work with young Catholics told me that seeing oneself in a saint can draw believers in. Katherine Dugan, a professor studying contemporary Catholicism at Springfield College, in Massachusetts, said that the highly religious students she has researched \u201clove a saint that\u2019s married. They love talking about lay saints, saints that do normal things that they can relate to.\u201d Kathleen Sprows Cummings, an American studies and history professor at Notre Dame and the author of A Saint of Our Own<\/em>, told me, \u201cMy students are fascinated by him.\u201d She continued, \u201cThey were talking about, like, \u2018He\u2019s wearing Nike sneakers.\u2019 They just thought this was just the greatest thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Any relatable characteristic could lure in the faithful, but, for the Church, the internet is a point of particular interest. The Vatican is certainly not against the online world; the Catholic Church was an early adopter of the internet, creating an official website in 1995. But some officials do seem wary of it. At a recent address to Catholic influencers, Pope Leo urged attendees to focus less on their follower count and more on their message. Heidi A. Campbell, a Texas A&M professor who studies technology and religion, told me, \u201cThe Catholic Church is very pro using this technology as long as it\u2019s affirming their values.\u201d Acutis\u2019s digital restraint seemed to achieve this balance: The official decree recognizing his heroic virtues\u2014an early hurdle on the path to sainthood\u2014cites his computer use as a model.<\/p>\n Acutis\u2019s devotion to the Eucharist seems to be another helpful point. \u201cHe was an average, simple, spontaneous, likable young man,\u201d Cardinal Agostino Vallini said in a 2020 homily. He also highlighted Acutis\u2019s attendance at daily Mass and the time he spent in Eucharistic adoration. As an ordinary teenager who also revered Communion, Acutis offers Vatican officials a way to show how belief in the practice can coexist with contemporary life.<\/p>\n But not all Catholics are looking for ordinariness in their religious figures. Many devout young people in the U.S. tend to desire an \u201cintentionally countercultural, more evangelistic Catholicism,\u201d Katherine Schmidt, a religious-studies professor at Molloy University, told me. Molly Worthen, a religious-history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that around the world, plenty of believers have a \u201chunger for evidence of God\u2019s presence\u201d that is not satisfied by \u201cmodern rationalistic approaches to the universe.\u201d She added: \u201cThe future of Christianity is highly supernaturalist.\u201d Acutis appeals to this cohort too.<\/p>\n The push and pull between adapting to the world and standing apart from it is core not just to Acutis\u2019s life but also to the history of Catholicism. Over the years, many in the Church have felt that it needs to change to avoid extinction. Worthen told me that in the 16th and 17th centuries, this impulse led the Vatican to tighten up the scientific rigor of its miracle-vetting process in response to reports of levitating saints. More recently, Church officials have discouraged the faithful from worshipping in Latin. At the same time, Schmidt told me, many other Catholics think that \u201cif we don\u2019t get really clear on what it is we believe and offer something substantive to people, then we\u2019re gonna die.\u201d<\/p>\n One unique feature of the Catholic Church, Worthen told me, has been its ability \u201cmore than maybe any other religious institution in the modern world\u201d to keep all of those diverging beliefs \u201cunder one tent.\u201d One day, devotees may decide whether Acutis was weird or relatable. Or they may not. For now, his story may be best for the Church if it\u2019s left unresolved.<\/p>\n