The Catholic Church has its first millennial saint. Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old Italian teenager who used his digital talents to spread devotion to the Eucharist, was canonised on Sunday in Rome alongside Pier Giorgio Frassati, a young Italian layman from the early 20th century.
Pope Leo XIV formally declared the two men saints before a congregation of more than 70,000 pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square.
The rite of canonization the first of his pontificate was met with thunderous applause, with Acutis’s family present among the faithful.
“[Lord], who has learned your counsel, unless you have given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high?” Pope Leo said, quoting the Old Testament during his homily.
“This question comes after two young blessed, Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis, were proclaimed saints.”
The Pope explained that the reference to King Solomon was fitting for the moment.
“This is providential because in the Book of Wisdom, this question is attributed to a young man like them. King Solomon. Upon the death of his father David, he realized that he had many things, power, wealth, health, youth, beauty, and the entire kingdom,” Leo continued.
Breaking from the style of his predecessor Pope Francis, who typically offered only brief remarks on new saints, Leo spoke at length about Acutis and Frassati.
He praised them as examples of youthful holiness rooted not in worldly pursuits but in friendship with Jesus.
“Like Solomon, the new Saints Carlo and Pier Giorgio understood that friendship with Jesus and faithfully following ‘God’s plans’ is greater than any other worldly pursuits,” the Holy Father said.
“God calls us to abandon ourselves without hesitation to the adventure that he offers us with the intelligence and strength that comes from his spirit,’ he added.
He urged the faithful to let go of worldly attachments.
“We can receive to the extent that we empty ourselves of the things and ideas to which we are attached, in order to listen to his word,” he added.
Reflecting on the Church’s long tradition of young saints, Pope pointed to St. Francis of Assisi as an example of preferring “the love of God and others over riches.” He then placed Acutis and Frassati in this same line of witnesses.
“Today we look to Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati and Saint Carlo Acutis, a young man from the early 20th century and a teenager from our own day, both in love with Jesus and ready to give everything for him,” he said.
“Dear friends, Saints Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis are an invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards and make them masterpieces.”
The Pope described their “winning formula” for holiness through the ordinary circumstances of life.
“Pier Giorgio encountered the Lord through school and church groups, Catholic Action, the Conferences of Saint Vincent, the FUCI (Italian Catholic University Federation), the Dominican Third Order and he bore witness to God with his joy of living and of being a Christian in prayer, friendship and charity,” Pope said.
“Carlo, for his part, encountered Jesus in his family, thanks to his parents, Andrea and Antonia who are here today with his two siblings, Francesca and Michele and then at school, and above all in the sacraments celebrated in the parish community,” he added.
Born in London in 1991 and raised in Milan, Acutis grew up fascinated by computers, coding, and video games.
While his peers pursued entertainment or online fame, he harnessed his skills to catalogue Eucharistic miracles worldwide.
His multilingual website remains one of the most comprehensive digital resources on the subject.
For Acutis, the internet was not a platform for self-promotion but a tool to “glorify Christ.” His radical mission in a digital age made him a figure of inspiration, especially for young Catholics navigating modern technology and faith.
Acutis died of leukemia in 2006. He was scheduled to be canonized on April 27, but the event was postponed due to the death of Pope Francis.
He was beatified in 2020, and the Vatican attributed two miracles to him that qualified him for sainthood; the healing of a Brazilian child with a rare pancreatic malformation and the recovery of a Costa Rican student seriously injured in an accident
With Sunday’s canonisation, the Church now venerates him and Pier Giorgio Frassati as patrons of young people models of how faith can transform ordinary lives into extraordinary testimonies.
