Pope Leo canonizes millennial saint Carlo Acutis
Pope Leo XIV presided over the canonization of Carlo Acutis, an Italian teenager who became the first millennial saint.
The recent canonization of Italy’s Bartolo Longo shows that occasionally on the path to sainthood, the devil is in the details.
Longo, a onetime satanist in the 1800s who was among seven new saints canonized this month by Pope Leo XIV, was an attorney whose foray into the occult purportedly led him to promise his soul to a demon.
But in a radical turnaround, he eventually returned to his Catholic faith and became an ardent proponent of Marian devotion, ultimately becoming known as the “Lawyer of the Madonna.”
Pope Leo announced Longo’s canonization in addition to six others at an Oct. 19 Mass at St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City in celebration of World Mission Sunday.
“Today we have before us seven witnesses, the new Saints, who, with God’s grace, kept the lamp of faith burning,” the pope said in his homily. “Indeed, they themselves became lamps capable of spreading the light of Christ.”
Born in 1841, Longo’s upbringing by devout Catholic parents took place as the church faced pushback from Italian nationalists, as noted by Catholic News Agency.
Longo would go on to pursue law at the University of Naples, according to Catholic news service OSV News.
But his father’s death led him to seek answers in the occult, according to the Jerusalem Post. Struggling with anxiety, depression and thoughts of suicide, he eventually underwent a severe fast and, according to the story, bargained with the devil for his soul.
In 1865, the Vatican News said, university professor Vincenzo Pepe persuaded Longo to ditch satanism. Seven years later, Longo was gripped by the calling of a new mission: To promote the rosary.
In Pompeii, still in shambles centuries after the volcanic destruction of Mount Vesuvius, Longo founded what would become the Shrine of the Virgin of the Rosary, creating the foundations of what would become Pompeii’s rejuvenation as a thriving community.
“It was Longo’s efforts that really made it rise from the ashes,” OSV News wrote.
More community efforts followed as Longo and his wife went on to create a girls’ orphanage and institutes for prisoners’ children in subsequent decades. Longo died in 1926.
“He loved the poor, cared for abandoned children, for prisoners’ sons and daughters, for the orphans,” Archbishop Tommaso Caputo of Pompeii told OSV News. “He spread the holy rosary, bore witness to faith, became an instrument of charity, and sowed hope in the world.”
In addition to Longo, Pope Leo elevated six other men and women to sainthood, including an Armenian archbishop tortured and killed after refusing to renounce Catholicism, a Venezuelan physician who dedicated his service to the poor and several nuns who spent decades helping the downtrodden.
The seven join two others canonized by the pope last month, including Carlo Acutis, a British-born Italian whose 2006 death at age 15 made him the first Catholic saint of the millennial generation.