Carlo Acutis

Carlo Acutis was born on 3 May 1991 in London to Italian parents, Andrea Acutis and Antonia Salzano, who were living in the United Kingdom for work. He was baptized in London at the Church of Our Lady of Dolours (Santa Maria dei Dolori). Not long after his birth the family returned to Italy and settled in Milan, which became the setting of his childhood and adolescence. He received his First Communion at the age of seven, an unusually early age, and thereafter made daily Mass, Eucharistic adoration, and the rosary central habits of his life. He attended schools in Milan, including the Jesuit Istituto Leone XIII. Those who knew him later described an ordinary, cheerful teenager who liked computers, video games, films, and football, yet who treated the Eucharist as the organising centre of his day.

Although he came from a comfortable background, Acutis was remembered for a relatively simple personal style and for practical concern for people who were poor or on the margins. He helped with catechesis in his parish and volunteered among the homeless in Milan. He taught himself programming and web design and used those skills to build a website that catalogued Eucharistic miracles from many countries, intending it as a work of catechesis rather than as a technical showcase. He also gathered material on Marian apparitions. Friends and family later emphasised that he did not present himself as a prodigy or a recluse: he remained a schoolboy with ordinary interests, while trying to keep prayer, charity, and the sacraments from becoming separate from the rest of life. He was a lay Catholic and did not enter a religious order.

In early October 2006 he became seriously ill and was diagnosed with acute leukemia. He offered his sufferings for the pope and for the Church. He died on 12 October 2006 in Monza, at the age of fifteen. He had a particular love for Assisi and for Saint Francis, and he was buried in Assisi. After the opening of his cause his remains were later transferred to the Sanctuary of the Spoliation (the church of Santa Maria Maggiore) in Assisi, where his body is now visitable and has become a major place of pilgrimage, especially for young people.

The diocesan inquiry into his life opened in Milan in 2013. Pope Francis recognised his heroic virtue and declared him Venerable in 2018. A miracle attributed to his intercession—the healing of a child in Brazil—was approved, and he was beatified in Assisi on 10 October 2020, with Cardinal Agostino Vallini presiding as papal delegate. A second miracle, involving the healing of a young Costa Rican woman who had suffered a severe head injury, was later recognised. He was canonized on 7 September 2025. His feast is kept on 12 October. In popular devotion he is invoked especially as a patron of youth, of computer programmers, and of the Internet, and he is often presented as an example of holiness lived in an ordinary contemporary setting rather than in a cloister or on the missions.