Brit teen to become a saint as millions flock to view body 19 years after death

A British born teenager dubbed a “digital disciple” due to being a computer whizz willbecome the first millennial saint on Sunday.

Carlo Acutis was born on May 3, 1991, in London to a wealthy Italian family with his father half English. The youngster grew up in Milan and his precocious faith journey took off after he receivedFirst Communion at the young age of seven. He regularly attended daily Mass, prayed the rosary and participated in eucharistic adoration.

While he enjoyed regular hobbies 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.

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Carlo used his computer savvy to create an online exhibit about more than 100 eucharistic miracles recognised by the church over many centuries, focused on the real presence of Christ that Catholics believe is in the consecrated bread and wine.

But aged 15 he became ill in October 2006, and 10 days later, he died of acute leukaemia at a hospital in northern Italy. His body was later transferred to an Assisi cemetery as Carlo had asked, because of his devotion to the hometown medieval saint, St Francis.

Since his death, young Catholics have flocked by the millions to Assisi, where through a glass-sided tomb they can see the young Acutis, dressed in jeans, Nike trainers and a sweatshirt, his hands clasped around a Rosary.

Those who can’t make it in person can watch the comings and goings on a webcam pointed at his tomb, a level of Internet accessibility not afforded to even popes buried in St. Peter’s Basilica.

His road to sainthood 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.

Carlo was declared “blessed” in 2020 after the Vatican 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.

Pope Leo, a Chicago native, will declare Acutis a saint on Sunday in his first canonisation ceremony, alongside another popular Italian, Pier Giorgio Frassati. Both ceremonies had been scheduled for earlier this year but were postponed following the death in April of Pope Francis.

It was Francis who had fervently willed the Acutis sainthood case forward, convinced that the church needed someone like him to attract young Catholics to church while addressing the promises and perils of the digital age.

Carlo was precociously savvy with computers before the social media era, reading college-level textbooks on programming and coding as a youngster. But he limited himself to an hour of video games a week, apparently deciding long before TikTok that human relationships were far more important than virtual ones.

“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,” Francis wrote in a 2019 document. “Yet he knew how to use the new communications technology to transmit the Gospel, to communicate values and beauty.”