Pope Leo XIV declared a 15-year-old computer whiz the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint on Sunday, giving the next generation of Catholics a relatable role model who used technology to spread the faith and earn the nickname “God’s influencer”.
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Leo canonised Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006, during an open-air Mass in St Peter’s Square before an estimated 80,000 people, many of them millennials and couples with young children.
During the first saint-making Mass of his pontificate, Leo also canonised another popular Italian figure who died young, Pier Giorgio Frassati.
Leo said both men created “masterpieces” out of their lives by dedicating them to God.
“The greatest risk in life is to waste it outside of God’s plan,” Leo said in his homily. The new saints “are an invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards and make them masterpieces.”
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Acutis was born on May 3, 1991, in London to a wealthy but not particularly observant Catholic family. They moved back to Milan soon after he was born and he enjoyed a typical, happy childhood, albeit marked by increasingly intense religious devotion.