Paintings by Jason Holley for Harper’s Magazine
A Millennial Saint, the Canonization of Carlo Acutis
by Emily Harnett, Harper’s Magazine
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/05/a-millenial-saint-carlo-acutis-canonization-as
A teenage saint in his casket in Assisi, in the chapel of St. Mary Maggiore, in his jeans and Nikes—also, St. Francis levitating and bilocating and St. Joseph of Cupertina flying—helping many to believe in miracles and remember the Heart of our Mother.
It is roughly three o’clock in the afternoon in Assisi, and the chapel of St. Mary Maggiore is thronged with pilgrims. I hover above them, watching via a camera perched discreetly on the ceiling. The camera points down at a white casket. On the side of the casket is a window, through which I can see the body of a teenage boy: his jeans, his Nikes, his navy track jacket. The pilgrims proceed single file past the boy, who has been dead now for many years. As they pass his casket, some of them brush their fingers across it tenderly. They will do this until nightfall, when the tomb will be closed to visitors. It will remain open, however, to everyone on the internet, as it is at all hours of the day, every day of the year.
I discovered this by accident several months ago. I had viewed the livestream from the tomb of the Blessed Carlo Acutis early one morning, only to realize, later that night, that I had never closed the tab. It was one among many left over from the day—Gmail inbox, Twitter feed, Amazon cart, child’s tomb—and I clicked on it with a certain feeling of unease. When the room reappeared before me, I was startled by its emptiness. Though the lights in the chapel were dim, the casket was backlit and bright. I studied what I could see of Carlo through my monitor and the window into his coffin. Nothing moved in the chapel or in my browser, save the endlessly updating chat-room scroll of strangers’ pleas for his intercession: “Carlo I’m suffering horrobly [sic],” wrote someone with the username abortion=worst_CRIME_in_history.PERIOD!!! “Carlo . . . please grant me a wonder.” Watching from the calm of my apartment, I couldn’t help feeling like an intruder on the privacy of others’ prayers, on the privacy of another’s grave. The image was so still that I also began to doubt whether the video was actually streaming.
“Carlo was an absolutely normal boy,” insists the copy on his official website, carloacutis.com. But given that Carlo will be named a Catholic saint, some would argue that he is one of the least normal boys ever to live—or, for that matter, to die. In canonizing him, the Church declares that we know with certainty, from our ignorant position here on earth, that he is in heaven. A devout Catholic who attended Mass daily, Carlo was also a coder, a gamer, and a millennial. His generation’s first saint, he was born in 1991 and died in 2006 from leukemia, when he was only fifteen. His formal canonization during the Church’s Jubilee of Teenagers this April suggests that it is teenagers—or, at least, Generation Z—to whom the Church intends to proffer him as a role model. On TikTok, videos from his tomb have attracted hundreds of thousands of views and a chorus of bewildered commenters: “hey so this is insane”; “in the tracksuit is CRAZY”; “bro what 😭 ”; “Thank God for the Protestant reformation 🙏🙏🙏🙏 .”
Part of the widespread fascination with the young saint stems from the fact that his canonization “brings holiness into the third millennium,” in the words of one of his hagiographers. He enters the canon less than two decades after his death, even though the process, on average, takes nearly two hundred years. The vast majority of Catholic saints lived and died in a world we’d hardly recognize. The idea that a saint might know something of our time—and something of our childhoods—can be hard to wrap one’s head around. Carlo celebrated his First Communion one year after the premiere of South Park. His PlayStation could technically be categorized as a second-class relic, the Church’s classification for a saint’s personal belongings. (“Getting an extra 5,000 years in purgatory bc it turns out I talked smack to the bl. carlo acutis in a Halo 2 lobby in 2004,” one person joked on Twitter.) I was born the same year as Carlo, and I remember having a general sense, growing up in a world with cable TV and high-speed internet, that no teenage boy would ever see heaven. According to the Church, Carlo entered the kingdom of God the same year that I snuck into a movie theater to see Borat without my parents. If it’s true, as Catholics say, that all of us are called to be saints, no one I knew was answering that call in the tenth grade.
The unlikeliness of such a contemporary saint has led to a staggering amount of enthusiasm for Carlo’s cause. Since his beatification in 2020, Carlo has become the object of more popular devotion than many a veteran saint. In Chicago, there is a parish of the Blessed Carlo Acutis, and there’s another of the same name in England; there’s a shrine to him at a church in New Jersey that Carlo’s mother furnished with an ornate reliquary containing a strand of his hair. Michael O’Neill, the self-proclaimed “Miracle Hunter” who hosts a podcast and television show of the same name, keeps a relic of Carlo on his desk. As O’Neill explained on his podcast, Carlo, too, was a miracle hunter of sorts, one who used the web to further his work. Carlo has been touted as “the patron saint of the internet” and “God’s influencer,” owing to his exhaustive efforts researching and cataloguing eucharistic miracles on his website.
By elevating a teen coder to sainthood, the Church suggests that science and technology need not be at odds with faith. In fact, this has long been the position of the Vatican: a miracle cannot be confirmed without the approval of scientific experts, who help to validate the claims associated with each candidate for sainthood. The vast majority of those are miracles of a medical nature. And the Church holds that two miracles, when attributed to a specific candidate’s intercession, offer proof that a saint really is with God in heaven. The other miraculous events and experiences that make up the wide world of Catholic spirituality (apparitions, levitations, bilocations, stigmata, and so-called moral miracles) rarely furnish the sort of evidence that would allow the investigators at the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints to rule out natural causes. Carlo’s canonization, however, has come at an inflection point in the history of the miraculous. Shortly before the Church confirmed the second healing miracle attributed to his intercession, the Vatican published a document overhauling its process for confirming supernatural phenomena, the first such revision since 1978.
Some commentators suspect that the revised guidelines were, in part, occasioned by the decades-long controversy over Our Lady of Medjugorje, the inspiration for an immensely popular pilgrimage site in Bosnia, where, in 1981, six people claimed to have seen and received messages from the Virgin Mary. The visionaries maintain that they have received prophecies, sometimes on an hourly basis, ever since. The Church has come to regard the phenomenon with some embarrassment, and last summer employed the new guidelines to render a long-awaited verdict of nihil obstat. This judgment is not a confirmation of the visionaries’ supernatural claims but a hedged endorsement of the site’s devotional appeal—in effect, the Vatican’s equivalent of “we can neither confirm nor deny.” The Vatican’s new classifications make possible such expressions of ambivalence. In any case, the guidelines will have the inevitable effect, one commentator writes, of disenchanting the world. By withdrawing authority to declare miracles from local officials, Rome ensures that there will be fewer miracles in the future.
The internet era has thus become a less miraculous one, which would seem to belie the pope’s optimistic insistence that the internet “is something truly good.” So, in some respects, does the canonization of Carlo himself. In hagiographies, his adolescence unfolds in the sweetly declarative sentences of a picture book: he played soccer, he built websites, he played video games, he loved Jesus. He did many of the normal things that normal teenagers do—except, of course, grow up. Or get an Instagram account. He will remain forever in high school, forever in 2006. The simplicity of his childhood is, like his PlayStation—and like his body—a relic from a different age. The patron saint of the internet never so much as held an iPhone. God’s influencer never knew what an influencer was. He never participated in a viral dance trend, never sent or received a Snapchat message, never surrendered his adolescence to powerful corporate algorithms. Ironically, only in death has he become what teenagers now are in life: eternally online.