Carlo Acutis canonized by Pope Leo XIV 19 years after his death

Few saints, now including Carlo Acutis, have lived to see the 21st century. The most recent addition, Acutis was canonized on Sept. 7, just 19 years after his death.

Born in May 1991, Acutis grew up in northern Italy, where he was raised in a relatively secular household. Best known for creating a list of confirmed Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions, which he published on a self-designed website, Acutis also spent much of his time in Eucharistic adoration and prayer, as noted by Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal.

Although Acutis is often associated with his website, Tim O’Malley, a Notre Dame professor at the McGrath Institute for Church Life, emphasized that Acutis was “only mildly dedicated to technology.”

“After all, he used the Internet to write about Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions. None of this made him a saint, but his love of the Mass, the natural world (he was very concerned about the ecological crisis), and the poor of Milan,” O’Malley wrote in a statement to The Observer. “In the end, tech was an instrument for St. Carlo, one that he used in the most ascetic of ways.”

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of American studies and history at Notre Dame, noted that Acutis’ use of technology gives her hope about its power for good.

“To have an example in Saint Carlo of someone who used the latest technology to evangelize is really an inspiration and also a sign of hope that there’s not only something redeemable about new technology but something potentially transformative,” she said.

In 2006, Acutis was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. He spent nearly a week in the hospital before he died on Oct. 12, 2006. 

Acutis was initially buried in his family cemetery in Ternengo before being reinterred in Assisi, the National Catholic Register shared. In 2018, Pope Francis declared Acutis to be venerable, and after his first miracle was confirmed by the church, he was declared blessed in 2020. In 2024, Francis recognized his second miracle, with a canonization date set for April 2025, during the Jubilee Year. The death of Francis, just days before the scheduled canonization, ultimately set back the event.

Pope Leo XIV presided over the canonization ceremony on Sunday, Sept. 7, where he confirmed the sainthood of both Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati.

Cummings believes Acutis’ relatable hobbies make holiness seem more accessible.

“I think when it comes to imitation sometimes the word saint in Catholic circles conjures someone who’s just incredibly holy and someone who’s far above us, someone who we can’t aspire to [be]. When you have someone like Carlo who is so relatable, who was a gamer saint, who was a 15-year-old, who lived a life of faith, then suddenly, holiness seems a little bit more attainable for the rest of us.” 

Acutis’ short path to sainthood is rare. The Pew Research Center found that the average timeline for someone to achieve sainthood is roughly 181 years. 

O’Malley does not believe that other saints will be canonized as quickly as Acutis.

“I do not think that it will have an effect upon future canonizations. The normal way that a saint is canonized is devotion and time. For every St. Carlo, there is a St. Hildegard of Bingen, who was canonized out of popular acclaim: 500 years after her death, there was still devotion. This, to me, should be the normal way that saints are canonized,” he wrote.

Notre Dame theology professor John Cavadini similarly shared in a written statement to The Observer that Acutis’ quick path to sainthood makes him more relatable. 

“Maybe it’s a good reminder that everyone is called to sanctity. We can sometimes think of the saints as distant from us especially if they lived long ago, but someone whose lifetime is so close to our own kind of makes the point that we can’t say it was easier back then to be a saint but times have changed … holiness is the same challenge it always was and it is within the reach of anyone who cares about it,” Cavadini wrote. “It may make people more alert to the holiness that is around them in the persons of very ordinary people, or seemingly very ordinary people, who quietly live lives of charity and devotion.” 

O’Malley echoed this idea, writing that he “always likes to remind people that sainthood is not something for the old alone. The seven-year-old is called to sanctity.” O’Malley hopes that Acutis will serve as an example for “young people to dedicate their lives to something more than the pursuit of fame, fortune, and prestige.”