Rome — A 15-year-old Italian web designer is about to change into the Catholic Church’s first saint from the millennial generation. On Monday, in a ceremony called an Ordinary Public Consistory, Pope Francis and the cardinals residing in Rome formally approved the canonization of Carlo Acutis, together with 14 others.
No specific date has been set for the canonization of Acutis, who was dubbed “God’s Influencer” for his work spreading Catholicism online, but he’s more likely to be proclaimed a saint in 2025.
Monday’s consistory was merely a formality, as Acutis’ cause for sainthood had already been thoroughly examined and approved by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints. The initial announcement got here in May.
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Acutis was born to wealthy Italian parents in London in 1991, however the family moved to northern Italy shortly after his birth. His family have said he was a pious child, asking on the age of seven to receive the primary communion.
He went on to attend church and receive communion day-after-day. As he grew older, he became excited by computers and the web, creating a web site on which he catalogued church-approved miracles and appearances of the Virgin Mary throughout history.
According to the Vatican, Acutis was “welcoming and caring towards the poorest, and he helped the homeless, the needy, and immigrants with the cash he saved from his weekly allowance.”
He reportedly used his first savings to purchase a sleeping bag for a homeless man he often met on his technique to mass.
Acutis died in October 2006 on the age of 15 in Monza, Italy, of leukemia. Some of the town’s poorest residents, whom Acutis had helped, turned out to pay their respects to the teenager at his funeral.
His body lies in an open tomb in Assisi, in central Italy, wearing blue jeans and Nike sneakers.
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“I’m completely happy to die because I lived my life without wasting even a minute of it on anything unpleasing to God,” Acutis was quoted as saying before he died.
Pope Francis declared Acutis “blessed” in October of 2020, after a miracle attributed to him was approved by the church. That miracle was a young boy in Brazil who was healed of a deadly pancreatic disease after he and his mother prayed to a relic of Acutis.
In order to be declared a saint, a second miracle — this one posthumous — needed to be approved. It got here in 2022, when a girl prayed at Acutis’ tomb for her daughter, who just six days earlier had fallen from her bicycle in Florence, causing severe head trauma.
She required a craniotomy and had a really low likelihood of survival, in line with doctors. On the day of the mother’s pilgrimage to Acutis’ tomb, the daughter began to breathe spontaneously. Just a couple of days later, the hemorrhage disappeared completely.
Along with Acutis, the canonizations of 14 other people were approved Monday, including 11 individuals who were killed in Syria in 1860, in the course of the Syrian Civil War, which saw hundreds of Christians killed.
