This Italian teenager was known as “God’s Influencer.” He’s about to become the first millennial saint.

Millions of young Catholics flocked to the small central Italian town of Assisi to pay tribute to Carlo Acutis – the Italian teenager informally known as “God’s Influencer.” On Sunday, the 15-year-old will become the first millennial saint.

Dressed in jeans, Nike sneakers and a sweatshirt, with his hands clasped around a rosary, Acutis has generated a near rock star-like fame among young faithful the likes of which the Catholic Church hasn’t seen in ages. 

Those who can’t make it in person can watch the comings and goings on a webcam pointed at his tomb, a level of internet accessibility not afforded even to popes buried in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Who was Carlo Acutis?

Acutis was born on May 3, 1991, in London to a wealthy Italian family. They moved back to Milan soon after he was born, and according to reports, he enjoyed a typical, happy childhood that was marked by his increasingly intense religious devotion.

He launched and managed a website for his local parish and later a Vatican-based academy. He also used his computer skills to create an online database of Eucharistic miracles around the world, available in nearly 20 languages. The site provides information about the 196 seemingly inexplicable events in the history of the church related to the Eucharist, which the faithful believe is the body of Christ.

“Carlo was well aware that the whole apparatus of communications, advertising and social networking can be used to lull us, to make us addicted to consumerism and buying the latest thing on the market,” the late Pope Francis wrote in a 2019 document. “Yet he knew how to use the new communications technology to transmit the Gospel, to communicate values and beauty.”

Acutis was known to spend hours in prayer before the Eucharist each day, a practice known as Eucharistic adoration.

“This was the fixed appointment of his day,” his mother, Antonia Salzano, said in a documentary that is airing Friday night at the U.S. seminary in Rome.

In October 2006, at age 15, he fell ill with what was quickly diagnosed as acute leukemia. He died in Monza, Italy, within days of his diagnosis. His body was entombed in Assisi and is on full display alongside other relics linked to him.

Fast track to sainthood

Acutis’ road to sainthood started more than 10 years ago at the initiative of a group of priests and friends, and formally took off shortly after Francis began his papacy in 2013.

Acutis was named “venerable” in 2018 after the church recognized his virtuous life, and his body was taken to a shrine in the Santuario della Spogliazione in Assisi, Italy. It was a major site linked to St. Francis’ life.

The teenager was beatified in 2020 – the first step to sainthood – after Acutis was credited with healing a Brazilian child of a congenital disease affecting his pancreas.

Last year, Francis approved the second miracle needed for Acutis to be made a saint. The second miracle involved the healing of a university student in Florence who had a brain bleed after suffering head trauma in a bicycle accident.

Francis and the cardinals residing in Rome formally approved his canonization in July 2024.

The canonization – the first for Pope Leo XIV – was initially scheduled for earlier this year but was postponed following Francis’ death in April. Leo will declare Acutis a saint alongside another popular Italian, Pier Giorgio Frassati, who also died young.

An appeal to the youth

For his admirers, Acutis was an ordinary kid who did extraordinary things: a typical Milan teen who went to school, played soccer and loved animals. But he also brought food to the poor, attended Mass daily and got his less-than-devout parents back to church.

“When I read his story for the first time, it was just like shocking to me, because from a very early age, he was just really drawn to Jesus Christ and he would go to Mass all the time,” Sona Harrison, an eighth grader at the St. John Berchmans’ school, which is part of the Blessed Carlo Acutis Parish in Chicago’s Northwest Side, told the Associated Press. “I feel like he’s a lot more relatable, and I definitely feel like I’m closer to God when I read about him.”

During Mass this week before the canonization, students processed into the chapel under an Acutis banner carrying things he might have carried: a soccer ball, a laptop and a knapsack.

“He fed the poor, he cared for the poor,” said 9-year-old David Cameron, who called Acutis “a great man.” Cameron, a fan of Sonic, Minecraft and Halo, also found inspiration in Acutis’ love of video games — and awe at Acutis’ restraint.

“He played video games for like only one hour a week, which I don’t think I can do,” he told the AP.