Carlo Acutis Canonized: A New Saint And ‘Influencer’ For The Modern Church
(ANALYSIS) History was made on Sunday in St. Peter’s Square. Pope Leo XIV declared Carlo Acutis — the 15-year-old tech prodigy known as “God’s Influencer” — the Catholic Church’s first Millennial saint.
Before 80,000 pilgrims, many of them young families and digital natives, this wasn’t just a canonization. It was a prophetic moment for the Catholic Church as it grapples with its place in the 21st century.
Acutis is no ordinary saint. Born in 1991 in London and raised in Milan, he grew up immersed in computers, coding and video games. He devoured college-level programming books and taught himself to build websites at a time when such skills were still rare for teens. He didn't use this gift to chase fame or fortune.
Instead, he created a multilingual website cataloguing Eucharistic miracles — an online apologetics project that remains a comprehensive resource. In a world obsessed with clicks and virality, Acutis’ mission was radical: Use the internet not to glorify the self, but to glorify Christ.
READ: ‘Carlo Acutis: Roadmap To Reality’ Challenges Teens To Reconnect With Faith
The church’s embrace of Acutis, who died in 2006, reflects a broader need to connect with a generation adrift. For decades, Catholic leaders have lamented the exodus of young people from the pews. Doctrinal orthodoxy, beautiful liturgies even social justice efforts have failed to stem the tide. The question has been: Who will reach Generation Z and younger generations in language they understand?
Acutis’ life is the church’s best answer so far. He didn’t wear a collar or preach from a pulpit. He wore jeans and a hoodie. He liked video games and had a sense of humor. Yet he also knelt before the Eucharist for hours, prayed the rosary each day and got his once-secular family to regularly attend Mass.
In Acutis, young Catholics don’t see a saint who is impossibly distant. They see someone who navigated the same digital labyrinth they live in — and, remarkably, was able to find Jesus.
What also makes Acutis so compelling isn't just his tech savvy, but his countercultural stance toward it. In an age of constant connectivity, he chose presence over distraction and prayer over performance.
Long before TikTok was shaping teen identities, he understood the hollowness of digital overexposure.
“All people are born as originals,” he once said, “but many die as photocopies.”
This, perhaps, is his greatest lesson: Technology is a tool, not a god.
Of course, some consider this canonization as branding, nothing more than a Vatican marketing effort designed to make Catholicism trend again. After all, the church throughout the West has struggled for relevance among our youth.
But Acutis is more than just a poster. He’s the embodiment of what teens today, and in the future, can strive to be in order to make the world a better place.
Acutis’ canonization was paired with that of Pier Giorgio Frassati, another young Italian known for his charity before dying at age 24 in 1925. Both saints — separated by nearly a century — were a model of holiness merged with youth.
Pope Leo XIV summed it up best: “The greatest risk in life is to waste it outside of God’s plan.”
Both Acutis and Frassati, he added, are “an invitation to all of us — especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards and make them masterpieces.”
Clemente Lisi serves as executive editor of Religion Unplugged.