St. Carlo Acutis (May 3, 91 - Oct 12, 2006)
All down through the ages, God continually raises up holy men and women to inspire others and help them come closer to him. Different saints often have different charisms, which are particularly suited to their time. One such saint is Carlo Acutis who is being canonized a saint this Sunday Sept, 6th, 2025, along with Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died at the age of 24.
I just want to share with you a little of the life of Carlo Acutis as his life is so much part of our time.
Blessed Carlo Acutis was born on May 3, 1991, in London, England, into a wealthy Italian business family to Andrea Acutis and Antonia Salzano, members of wealthy Italian families. His father's family worked in the Italian insurance industry and his mother's ran a publishing company. They moved to Italy soon after his birth and he was cared for by Irish and Polish nannies.
Acutis’ mother, Antonia, says she doesn’t know how he came to love Jesus. He had been baptized as a baby, but the family didn’t practice the faith. Perhaps it was their Polish nanny who told Carlo about Jesus. Regardless of the source, Carlo had a deep love for Jesus even as a preschooler, asking his bemused mother if they could stop in to see Jesus when they walked past churches in their Milan neighborhood — and even insisting on taking flowers to place at the feet of the Blessed Mother.
Antonia wasn’t sure what to do with this piety in her young son, and she wasn’t prepared to answer his many questions. But as he asked, she began to wonder as well. His curiosity eventually prompted her to take theology classes; beyond just being back at Mass, Antonia was diving into her faith, and all because of Carlo. “He was like a little savior for me,” she said in an interview published in 2019.
Carlo’s longing for the Eucharist drove him to ask permission to receive earlier than was customary. At 7, Carlo received his first Communion and never missed Mass again. Not just Sunday Mass, either. Every day of his life, Carlo went to Mass. Every day, he stole a few minutes to pray in silence before the tabernacle. And while his parents sometimes went with him, Carlo often went alone. When they traveled, Carlo’s first order of business was to find a church and figure out Mass times. Whether or not his parents joined him, Carlo would be there. Every day.
And they traveled quite a bit. Carlo’s deep love of Mary (whom he called “the only woman in my life”) led the family to Marian apparition sites all over Europe. But their pilgrimages became more intentional when Carlo was 11 and got an idea.
After receiving his first Communion, Carlo had begun to lament the many, many people who don’t go to Mass. “They’ll stand in line for hours to go to a concert,” he would say, “but won’t stay even a moment before the tabernacle.” Eager to do something to draw souls to Jesus, young Carlo began to research Eucharistic miracles.
He was convinced that people wouldn’t be able to stay away from the holy Mass if they knew about the miracles of Lanciano and Poznan and the dozens of others recognized by the church. So Carlo began to research, dragging his parents from one shrine to another in order to take pictures for the website he was building.
Born the year of the launch of the worldwide web, Carlo was also something of a child prodigy when it came to computer skills. He was able to read and write at the age of 4. By age 9 he was reading books meant for the faculty of computer engineers at the University of Milan, referred to as La Statale, which is a renowned research facility. His mother said he knew the importance of the internet from the beginning, not for a career purpose for himself, but for the importance of the evangelization of his faith.
He was asked to set up a web page for his parish and in high school began to set up a website on the cataloging of Eucharist Miracles and Marian Apparitions used by the Vatican. He launched it in 2004 and worked on it for two and a half years. He created a portable display along with the website cataloging 187 Eucharistic Miracles.
For all his technological skills, Carlo was a friendly, outgoing kid. He was so friendly that his family was reluctant to go on walks with him; Carlo knew everybody, it seemed and couldn’t help but stop to talk to every person he passed. He had a sensitive heart and was always looking out for those who were suffering: classmates whose parents were going through a divorce, kids who were being bullied.
Carlo’s approach was always friendship. And through that friendship, people were always drawn to Jesus. As pure and as pious as he was, nobody felt judged by the young saint. His uncle says that being with Carlo filled your heart and that joy left people seeking and wondering, as Carlo’s mother had years before. A young Hindu man who worked for Carlo’s family was baptized as a direct result of his friendship with Carlo, while many others returned to the faith.
Carlo was particularly close to the homeless people in his neighborhood, packing up food most days to take out to his friends on the street. Though his family was wealthy, Carlo had no patience for excess. He saved up his pocket money to buy a sleeping bag for a homeless friend, and when his mother suggested they buy Carlo such “luxuries” as a second pair of shoes, he revolted. Technology, though, wasn’t a luxury. It was an important part of his apostolate, and Carlo had no qualms about using three computers when building his website.
Through all this, every day: mass, the rosary, silent time before the tabernacle. Carlo insisted that holiness was impossible otherwise. “The Eucharist is my highway to heaven,” he would say, and nothing could get between him and his daily appointment with the Lord. “The more we receive the Eucharist, the more we will become like Jesus,” Carlo said.
How did he have the time? In between teaching himself computer skills, playing soccer, riding his bike around Milan to visit the poor, teaching himself the saxophone, patiently explaining technology to his older relatives and making one movie after another? According to his mother, Carlo didn’t waste time on useless things. He limited himself to an hour a week of video games (because, he said, he didn’t want to become a slave to them) and focused the rest of his time on things that were valuable. But that didn’t exclude silly animations or videos of his dogs — Carlo knew that something doesn’t need to be catechetical to be valuable, and he enjoyed leisure all the more because its greatest value was in being fun.
Carlo hungered for heaven. “We have always been awaited in heaven,” he said, and throughout his life his eyes were fixed on eternity. So when, at 15, he went to the hospital with the flu and was diagnosed instead with an acute and untreatable leukemia, Carlo wasn’t upset. He was ready to go home. “I can die happy,” he told his mother, “because I haven’t wasted even a minute on things that aren’t pleasing to God.”
Within three days, Carlo Acutis was dead.
He was a remarkable young man, but he was an ordinary man. He had no visions. He didn’t levitate when he prayed. He just lived like heaven was real. He was completely himself, video games and computer programming and all, but entirely Christ’s.
Two Miracles
Part of the process of being made a saint, is to have two miracles attributed to the intercession of that person. The first miracle involved a boy from Brazil named Mattheus being healed from a serious birth defect called an annular pancreas after he and his mother asked Acutis to pray for his healing.
Mattheus was born in 2009 with a serious condition that caused him difficulty eating and serious abdominal pain. He was unable to keep any food in his stomach and vomited constantly.
By the time Mattheus was nearly four years old, he weighed only 20 pounds, and lived on a vitamin and protein shake, one of the few things his body could tolerate. He was not expected to live long.
His mother, Luciana Vianna, had spent years praying for his healing.
At the same time, a priest friend of the family, Fr. Marcelo Tenorio, learned online about the life of Carlo Acutis, and began praying for his beatification. In 2013 he obtained a relic from Carlo’s mother, and he invited Catholics to a Mass and prayer service in his parish, encouraging them to ask Acutis’ intercession for whatever healing they might need.
Mattheus’ mother heard about the prayer service. She decided she would ask Acutis to intercede for her son. In fact, in the days before the prayer service, Vianna made a novena for Acutis’ intercession, and explained to her son that they could ask Acutis to pray for his healing.
On the day of the prayer service, she took Mattheus and other family members to the parish.
Fr. Nicola Gori, the priest responsible for promoting Acutis’ sainthood cause, told Italian media what happened next:
“On October 12, 2013, seven years after Carlo’s death, a child, affected by a congenital malformation (annular pancreas), when it was his turn to touch the picture of the future blessed, expressed a singular wish, like a prayer: ‘I wish I could stop vomiting so much.’ Healing began immediately, to the point that the physiology of the organ in question changed,” Fr. Gori said.
On the way home from the Mass, Mattheus told his mother that he was already cured. At home, he asked for French fries, rice, beans, and steak – the favorite foods of his brothers.
He ate everything on his plate. He didn’t vomit. He ate normally the next day, and the next. Vianna took Mattheus to physicians, who were mystified by Mattheus’ healing.
On Feb. 22, 2020, Pope Francis approved the miracle paving the way for his beatification.
In May 2024, Pope Francis approved a second miracle attributed to Carlo: the unlikely recovery in 2022 of a Costa Rican woman who suffered a traumatic head injury in a bicycle accident while studying at a university in Florence, Italy. That miracle cleared the path to his canonization.
On his website, Carlo wrote a list of instructions for becoming holy, encouraging people to go to Mass daily and confession weekly. But his very first rule for becoming holy was this: “You must want it with all your heart.”
This is the legacy of Saint Carlo Acutis: an ordinary, modern kid who watched cartoons and used the internet and wanted holiness with all his heart. This is why the world loves him. Because he shows us that holiness is possible for every one of us even if you have an Instagram account even if you’re a gamer.
In his own words: ‘Holiness is possible for you, right now, but you have to want it.’
