Catholic Church Canonizes First Millennial Saint Carlo Acutis

A 15-year-old Italian teen has been named the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint.

Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006, was canonized by Pope Leo XIV during a Mass in St.

Peter’s Square on Sunday. He also canonized Pier Giorgio Frassati, another Italian who died young.

“The greatest risk in life is to waste it outside of God’s plan,” the pope said. The new saints “are an invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives but to direct them upwards and make them masterpieces.”

Acutis was born in London to a wealthy Italian family that moved back to Milan soon after he was born. He developed and managed a website for his local parish and later a Vatican-based academy. Acutis also used his computer skills to create an online database of Eucharistic miracles around the world, available in nearly 20 languages. The site provides information about the 196 seemingly inexplicable events in the history of the church related to the Eucharist, which Catholics believe is the body of Christ.

“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,” the late Pope Francis wrote in 2019. “Yet he knew how to use the new communications technology to transmit the gospel, to communicate values and beauty.”

In 2006, he died shortly after being diagnosed with acute leukemia. Acutis’ path to sainthood began more than 10 years ago, initiated by a group of priests and friends, and formally took off shortly after Francis became pope in 2013. He was beatified in 2020 after being credited with healing a Brazilian child of a congenital disease affecting his pancreas. Francis and the cardinals residing in Rome formally approved his canonization in July 2024.

For his admirers, Acutis was an ordinary kid who did extraordinary things: a typical Milan teen who went to school, played soccer and loved animals. But he also brought food to the poor, attended Mass daily and got his less-than-devout parents back to church.

Frassati, the other saint canonized last Sunday, lived from 1901 to 1925, when he died from polio. He was born into a prominent Turin family but is known for his devotion to serving the poor and carrying out acts of charity while spreading his faith to his friends.