There’s at least one millennial in heaven, according to the Catholic Church.
Pope Leo XIV announced the canonization of Carlo Acutis on Sept. 7, marking an official declaration that the church has recognized him as a saint. The teenager was canonized alongside fellow Italian Pier Giorgio Frassati, becoming the first millennial saint.
The church does not make saints, only recognizes them, the Rev. Anthony Gerber, a high school teacher and priest at St. Genevieve Parish in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, told The Epoch Times.
“Anybody who’s in heaven is a saint,” he said.
Gerber explained there are “capital ‘S’ saints” and “lowercase ’s’ saints.”
The lowercase “s” saints, he said, are the countless “hidden saints,” men and women who are in heaven but have not been canonized. The Catholic Church recognizes those saints on All Saints’ Day.
Carlo, on the other hand, was one of the latest examples of a capital “S” saint, which means, he said, that the church “formally pronounces, infallibly that this person is in heaven.”
The road to church-recognized sainthood is a lengthy process that requires extensive data and testimony about the person’s life, as well as two verified miracles attributed to the intercession of the candidate for sainthood.
Life of Saint Carlo Acutis
Carlo was born on May 3, 1991, and died on Oct. 12, 2006, after losing his battle with leukemia.
During his short life, he was known for his extraordinary devotion to the core Catholic belief that Jesus Christ is truly present in the Eucharist. Upon receiving his first Holy Communion, which typically happens at the age of seven, Carlo strived to attend Mass every day. His devotion was responsible for bringing his own family back into the church.
That included his mother, who said she had attended Catholic Mass only for her First Communion, Confirmation, and her wedding before Carlo’s insistence led her back to church. His au pair, Rajesh Mohur, also credited his conversion to Catholicism from Hinduism to Carlo’s example.
“He used to say, ‘There are queues in front of a concert, in front of a football match, but I don’t see these queues in front of the Blessed Sacrament’ … So, for him the Eucharist was the center of his life,” Carlo’s mother, Antonia Salzano, said in a 2023 interview with EWTN News Nightly.
Carlo had many of the same interests as other boys his age. His mother said he enjoyed playing soccer and Nintendo Game Boy, GameCube, PlayStation, and Xbox video games. He was also a fan of Spider-Man and Pokémon.
But even when he was enjoying secular activities with his friends, he was outspoken about the importance of Mass and confession, the Eucharist, chastity, and human dignity.
He was also known for helping the poorest of the poor, defending his faith against his classmates, and standing up for those at school who were bullied.
At Jesuit High School, an all-boys Catholic school in Tampa, Florida, Brother Giovanni Diaz Jimenez, a Jesuit scholastic, told The Epoch Times that his students were ecstatic to see Carlo named a saint.
“They identify with Carlo Acutis,” he said. ”Carlo was a kid like them, not from 300, 200, 100 years ago. He was from ‘yesterday,’ so to speak. Even visually, his iconography is that of a kid like them, who dresses like them, who liked to do things that they do now. With the difference [being] that Carlo discovered something fascinating that changed his life: his faith in Jesus Christ.”
Diaz Jimenez said he feels a personal connection with Carlo: The two were born just 10 days apart. He said he sees the Italian teen’s canonization as a sign of the potential holiness of a whole generation.
Carlo’s most significant ministry was in the digital realm. He taught himself some basic coding languages, including C and C++, and launched a website that catalogued all of the Eucharistic miracles that have been documented around the world. It took him 2 1/2 years to gather 187 documented miracles. That website is still active. An exhibition based on the website has traveled to thousands of parishes across five continents.
Carlo’s spiritual director said the teenager was convinced that the scientific evidence gathered from examining Eucharistic miracles would help bring people back to the Catholic Church and restore their faith in the Eucharist.
The 15-year-old was diagnosed with cancer in October 2006. “I offer all the suffering I will have to endure to the Lord for the pope and for the church, in order not to go through purgatory and to go straight to heaven,” he said shortly before his death.
At his request, Carlo was buried in Assisi, Italy, home of St. Francis and St. Clare. In 2019, his body was transferred to Assisi’s Church of St. Mary Major, where he lies in repose in a glass-fronted tomb, dressed casually in blue jeans and Nike shoes. The tomb has been visited by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from around the world.
After his death, word of his impact started to spread, and the process to confirm his sainthood began.
Confirming Sainthood
Diaz Jimenez explained that the road to sainthood is long.
“We gather testimonies from people who have known the person being proposed for sainthood,” he said. ”Otherwise, we search for videos, archives, and documentation that explain how this person heroically lived their faith.
“As we advance in this process of gathering information, and we discover that this person did live a holy life, we give them the titles of Servant of God, [and] Venerable.”
Seven years after his death, the first miracle involving Carlo’s intercession was reported. In 2013, a 3-year-old boy in Brazil was cured of a malformation of his pancreas after he and his family asked for Carlo’s intercession. In other words, they asked Carlo to join them in asking God to cure him.
The miraculous nature of the event was confirmed, and Pope Francis announced Carlo’s beatification on Oct. 10, 2020, giving him the title “Blessed.”
The second miracle came in 2022, when a 21-year-old student from Costa Rica nearly died after seriously injuring her head in a bicycle accident in Florence. The young woman could have died at any moment, according to the Vatican. Her mother went to Assisi to pray at Carlo’s tomb, and that same day, her daughter began to breathe on her own again. It was later found that her brain hemorrhage had completely disappeared.
Carlo was scheduled to be canonized during the Vatican’s Jubilee of Teenagers celebration in April, but the ceremony was delayed because of the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV.
Gerber believes that Carlo’s story disproves the idea that young people are the future of the church. They’re more than the future of the church, he said; they are integral right now.
“I think it serves to remind us … Holiness is always in season, and throughout the history of the church, even the young are called to be saints,” he said.
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