UK-born, tech-savvy teen, Carlo Acutis, to become first millennial saint

A London-born Italian teenager who spent his short life spreading the faith online will become the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint, after the Vatican attributed to him a second miracle.

Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia in 2006 aged 15, was beatified four years ago after the Vatican ruled he had miraculously saved another boy’s life.

He will now become a saint after Pope Francis approved another miraculous act, an intercession on behalf of a young woman in Florence who suffered severe head trauma in July 2022.

Carlo was born in London on May 3, 1991, to Italian parents, and moved with them to Milan as a young boy, where he grew up with a huge interest in computers.

“He was considered a computer genius… But what did he do? He didn’t use these media to chat and have fun,” his mother Antonia Salzano said in an interview with Vatican News at the time of his 2020 beatification.

Instead, “his zeal for the Lord” drove him to make a website on miracles, she said.

He also warned his contemporaries that the internet could be a curse as well as a blessing.

While his mother said the family rarely attended church, Carlo was religious from a young age.

He also enjoyed playing football and was known in his neighbourhood for his kindness to those living on the margins of society.

He died on October 1, 2006, in Monza, northern Italy.

The Vatican had previously claimed the teen had posthumously interceded in 2013 to cure a Brazilian boy suffering from a rare pancreatic disease.

And on Thursday, it recognised another miracle, involving a student in Florence called Valeria.

According to the Vatican’s news outlet, Valeria suffered severe head trauma after falling off her bicycle and doctors gave her a very low chance of survival.

Her mother Liliana, from Costa Rica, made a pilgrimage to Carlo’s tomb in the Italian town of Assisi.

That same day, July 8, 2022 — six days after the accident — Valeria began to breathe on her own, Vatican News said.

And the next day, she began to move and partially regained her speech. On July 18, a CAT scan proved that her haemorrhage had disappeared.