by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News July 3, 2024
A teenager who used his computer skills to chronicle miracles and spread awareness of the Catholic faith will become the church’s first millennial saint.
Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia at age 15 in 2006, was approved for canonization on Monday by Pope Francis and a group of cardinals, Vatican News announced.
Acutis is referred to as “God’s influencer” and the “patron saint of the Internet” for his work cataloging Eucharistic miracles around the world.
Acutis will likely be proclaimed a saint at some point in 2025, during the church’s jubilee year.
Acutis, who was born on May 3, 1991 in London and died on Oct. 12, 2006 in Italy, was a devout Catholic who taught himself programming and created websites with a spiritual focus, including his widely praised database of miracles.
He is credited with having a hand in two healing miracles after his death — the requisite number for all Catholic saints.
Acutis was beatified in October 2020, after the Vatican officially recognized that he interceded from heaven in 2013 to save the life of a Brazilian child who was suffering from a rare pancreatic condition. The Vatican said 4-year-old Matheus Vianna was healed after praying to Acutis and coming into contact with one of his relics, a piece of clothing.
A second miracle was attributed to Acutis in May of this year. A girl from Costa Rica suffered a serious head trauma after falling off a bike in Florence, Italy, but recovered against the odds after her mother prayed at Acutis’s tomb in Assisi.
Acutis’s mother, Antonia Salzano, said: “[With] all the media, the technologies, it seems sometimes that holiness is something that belongs to the past. Instead, holiness is also something nowadays in this modern time.”
Prior to Acutis, ‘Mama Antula’, an 18th century Argentinian woman, was the most recent person to be pronounced a saint. That was in February of this year.
Monday’s approval of sainthood for Acutis clears the final hurdle in a multiyear process, which began in 2013 when the pope approved the cause for his beatification and canonization and named him “a Servant of God.”
Catholic Church has its first millennial saint in Carlo Acutis added by Editor Two on
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