Stories of the Saints
Saint Carlo Acutis
An ordinary teenager who loved video games, Spider-Man, and the Eucharist — and became the first millennial saint.
The Basics
- Feast day: October 12.
- Lived: May 3, 1991 to October 12, 2006.
- Born: London, England; the family moved to Milan, Italy a few months later.
- Known for: a deep love of the Eucharist and for using his computer skills to catalog Eucharistic miracles online and help build an exhibition that traveled to parishes around the world.
- Beatified: October 2020, in Assisi, Italy.
- Canonized: September 7, 2025, by Pope Leo XIV, together with Pier Giorgio Frassati — widely called the first millennial saint.
- Resting place: the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at the Sanctuary of Spogliazione, Assisi, Italy.
The ordinary teenager
Carlo Acutis was born in London on May 3, 1991, to Andrea Acutis and Antonia Salzano, and the family moved to Milan, Italy, a few months later. His parents were not especially devout when he was young. That changed because of Carlo, not the other way around.
After his First Communion at age seven, Carlo began going to Mass as often as he could manage, and he prayed the rosary. His example drew members of his own family, and then others around him, toward the faith — a seven-year-old leading the way.
He was an ordinary teenager in all the visible ways: school, friends, video games, Spider-Man, Pokémon. But the people who knew him remember that he put limits on his own game time, and that he talked with his friends about Mass, about confession, and about the dignity of every human person.
How he treated people
Carlo stood up for classmates who were being bullied. He made room for a friend whose parents were divorcing. He brought food to people living on the streets of Milan. And he taught the family's Hindu au pair, Rajesh Mohur, about prayer and the Eucharist — Mohur later converted and was baptized.
Kindness, for Carlo, was not a program. It was a habit, practiced in the places where he happened to be standing.
The Eucharist, on the internet
Carlo taught himself computer skills, and he put them to work for what he loved most. He built an online catalog of Eucharistic miracles and helped put together an exhibition about them — an exhibition that has since been displayed in thousands of parishes on five continents.
He called the Eucharist his "highway to heaven." And he understood, earlier than most, that the internet could be used to carry holy things to people who might never otherwise find them. People often call him the "patron of the internet" or "God's influencer" — popular nicknames, not a formal title, but they say something true about how he lived.
The offering
As a teenager, Carlo was diagnosed with leukemia. He offered his suffering for the pope and the Church. He died on October 12, 2006, at the age of fifteen, and was buried in Assisi, the home of Saint Francis and Saint Clare.
Two healings attributed to his intercession were recognized on the road to his canonization: a Brazilian boy born with a malformation of the pancreas, healed in 2013, and Valeria Valverde, a twenty-one-year-old student from Costa Rica studying in Florence, who recovered from a severe head injury in 2022 after her mother prayed at Carlo's tomb.
His tomb in Assisi, where he is seen in jeans and sneakers, has become a place of pilgrimage — especially for young people, who come to stand before a saint who dressed like them and lived like them and loved the Eucharist above everything.
Saint Carlo, pray for us.
