Carlo Acutis, who died at the age of 15 from leukemia in 2006, will now become the first “millennial saint” of the Catholic Church.
Carlo Acutis was born in London in 1991. He was a computer prodigy who at a very early age had developed websites for spreading the teachings of the church online before he died. Since then, he has been known as “God’s influencer”.
Acutis lived with his parents in Italy. After his death, his body was shifted to a tomb where it was kept on full display along with the boy’s belongings.
According to Carlo’s mother, the boy at a very early age showed signs of religious devotion and used to ask his parents to take him to church at the age of 3.
The boy used to donate his pocket money to the church to help the poor. Carlo had himself learnt how to create websites for Catholic organizations.
Acuti also built a platform that had documents of all the miracles that took place across the globe.
The Catholic new Saint and his miracles
The church decided to grant a 15-year-old sainthood after it was reported that a seven-year-old Brazilian boy made a sudden recovery from a rare pancreatic disease after touching one of Acutis’s t-shirts. A priest had also prayed to Carlo Acutis on behalf of the child.
The church deemed the boy’s recovery as miraculous after the Pope assessed and approved it.
According to Catholicism, one person is qualified to become a saint if two miraculous events happen related to them and are approved by the Pope.
A second miracle attributed to Acutis was approved by Pope Francis on Thursday (May 23), which qualified the teenager for canonization.
According to a Vatican statement issued on Thursday, the miracle being recognized involves a Costa Rican woman, Liliana, whose daughter Valeria Valverde, 21, suffered severe head trauma from a bicycle accident in Florence on 2 July 2022.
The Vatican says that Valeria underwent critical surgery and had slim survival chances according to her doctors. Liliana reportedly prayed at Carlo Acutis’s tomb in Assisi on 8 July, while her secretary had already begun praying to him.
That same day, according to the Vatican, Valeria started to breathe on her own, and the following day she regained some movement and speech. By 18 July, a CAT scan showed her hemorrhage had vanished, and she entered rehabilitation on 11 August, making rapid progress.
The student’s mother prayed at the tomb of Acutis for her recovery after which she said her daughter was moved from the ventilator and later in the scans, the brain injury had disappeared.
Acutis is the first person to be canonized among those born in the 1990s.
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