The Catholic Church has recognized 15-year-old Italian teenager Carlo Acutis as a saint for confirmed healing miracles that occurred after his death.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS.
The Catholic Church has recognized 15-year-old Italian teenager Carlo Acutis as a saint for confirmed healing miracles that occurred after his death. The boy was born in London to a family of Italian immigrants in 1991. A few years later, the family returned to Italy and there, when he was a teenager, Carlo was diagnosed with leukemia. In 2006 he died in Monza, a city located near Milan. Carlo was popularly nicknamed the “Patron Saint of the Internet” or “God Influencer” for spreading the ideas of Christianity online.
He became the first millennial (person born between 1980 and 2000) to be recognized as a saint. Previously, in 2020, Acutis was beatified. So far, the Vatican has not announced an official date for Carlo Acutis’ canonization ceremony. These events are expected to attract tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the world.
Since April 2019, a glass reliquary containing the body of a young saint has been on display in the Italian city of Assisi, in the church of Santa María Maggiore. Acutis is wearing his favorite Nike sneakers, jeans, and a sweatshirt. In his hands he holds a rosary with black stones and a cross.
It is known that from a young age the boy donated all his pocket money to the poor, attended religious services every day and received communion regularly. At school, Carlo always stood up for students who were being bullied, volunteered after school, and brought food and warm blankets to the homeless. At the age of 14 he decided to be a catechist in the Milanese parish of Santa María Segreta.
The Catholic Church has recognized 15-year-old Italian teenager Carlo Acutis as a saint for confirmed healing miracles that occurred after his death.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS.
When Carlo Acutis was diagnosed with leukemia, he confessed to his parents: “I am happy to die because I lived my entire life without wasting a minute on anything that God did not like.” At the same time, the teenager created a website where he talked about the miracles of the Eucharist in different parts of the world: when, during the Holy Supper, a wafer or wafer (analogous to an Orthodox prosphora) could become a piece of a human body . Flesh or drops of blood may appear. The site is still up and running and being updated.
One of the most recent miracles of the Eucharist occurred in 2013 in the Polish city of Legnica. During the Christmas Mass, the Eucharistic bread became myocardium, part of the heart muscle tissue. This was confirmed by specialists from the Faculty of Histopathology at the University of Szczecin. In 2016, the Vatican officially allowed the Church of San Jacinto to display the host for worship.
Almost 20 years after Carlo’s death, Pope Francis recognized the miracle of healing attributed to the new saint. In 2022, Valeria Valverde, a 21-year-old Costa Rican resident, was seriously injured in an accident. The tragedy occurred in Florence, where the girl was studying at the time. Valeria couldn’t breathe on her own; Doctors recorded a brain hemorrhage. Doctors performed emergency surgery to relieve intracranial pressure, but the Costa Rican’s life was at stake. Six days later, her mother made a special trip to pray at Carlo Acutis’s coffin, and at the end she left a note asking that her daughter recover as soon as possible. The same day, Valeria began to breathe on her own, began to move her arms and legs normally and after 10 days she was discharged from intensive care; The doctors no longer saw any trace of hemorrhage on the images. After this, the girl only needed a short physiotherapy treatment to fully recover.
Previously, in 2013, the miracles of Carlo Acutis were already reported. Prayers to him helped cure a boy in Brazil who suffered from a rare pancreatic disease.
Since 2013, the year of Pope Francis’ election, 912 people have been canonized. Furthermore, this applied to people born before 1926. Carlo Acutis became the first saint to live in the 21st century. Although the boy lived in Britain for only a few years, English Catholics consider him an English saint. The Archbishop of Birmingham founded the parish of Blessed Carlo Acutis in 2020, with churches in Wolverhampton and Womborne.
