The Catholic Church has a millennial saint. Is that because of miracles or marketing?

The canonization of Carlo Acutis says more about the Church’s PR machine than the existence of divine intervention

This newsletter is free and goes out to over 22,000 subscribers, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can use the button below to subscribe or use my usual Patreon page!

---

Over the weekend, Pope Leo XIV oversaw a canonization ceremony in which he declared that Carlo Acutis—who died of leukemia in 2006 at the age of 15—was now a saint.

Carlo Acutis (screenshot via YouTube)

Carlo, the first millennial saint, has become especially well known, and the Catholic Church is hoping his fame will encourage more young people to be active in the church. Because of his use of digital technology to spread the faith — including developing a website in which he listed miracles — he has been nicknamed “God’s influencer.”

That website is still online. It’s fairly basic—which is fine because, again, he was a kid—though it’s hard to imagine that a list of “miracles by country” with links to scans from what appears to be an encyclopedia really convinced anyone to convert. (Not the point of the story. I’m just saying.)

Even though many Catholics are celebrating the announcement, and some have turned his image into a meme, it’s important to look at what went into the sainthood process, since the “evidence” in favor of his canonization makes very little sense if you’re not already in the fold. That’s not to cast any negative light on the child who died—that’s a tragedy—but to criticize a ritual that centralizes fictional accounts of what someone supposedly did instead of the life he actually led.

So what does it take to be a saint?

Simply put, there needs to be proof that you played a role in two separate miracles. (And if you think those two concepts contradict each other… you’d be right.)

The first “miracle” involved a four-year-old boy, Matheus Vianna, who was born with a deformed pancreas. It was painful, he couldn’t keep any food down, and he was constantly vomiting. He was too weak to obtain a transplant, so his death appeared imminent.

While that was happening, in 2013, Acutis’ mother gave Brazilian Rev. Marcelo Tenório de Almeida a piece of her late son’s clothing, and the priest included it as part of a chapel in his church every year, telling parishioners that they should pray for Acutis’ intercession if they were in need of any healing. Word of that got around to Matheus’ family, and they decided to make the trek to the church, where Matheus kissed the cloth and prayed to stop vomiting.

As they began to head home, Matheus allegedly said he was all better. He asked his mother for fries, beans, and steak—solid foods that his brothers loved and a departure from his own liquid-only diet—and he ate everything without a problem.

“It was the first time in his entire life that this happened. He had been vomiting after eating since he was born; he even rejected breast milk. Since that day, I knew he was cured because of Carlo. The change was too drastic and too sudden,” she said.

Gradually, Matheus gained weight and when he returned to medical appointments, the change in the morphology of his pancreas was confirmed by an ultrasound exam, according to his mother.

Was it a miracle or was it a misdiagnosis? The truth is: The Catholic Church doesn’t really care. The boy got better after his spiritual interaction with Acutis—a form of logic so fallacious, it has its own name—and it was eventually declared a miracle after a very long and arguably gratuitous process:

Reports of this supposed miracle were sent to the [Dicastery for the Causes of Saints], who handed them on to its medical board, a commission of professional doctors. From there, they were passed on to the dicastery’s theologians, who checked that they aligned with Catholic teaching on miracles. They forwarded them to the department’s senior bishops and cardinals, who, several years after the events occurred, made a formal recommendation to the pope that he should dub Carlo as “blessed”. The ceremony in Assisi was held a few months later. Interest in the digital saint spread rapidly among the faithful. Soon it became a global phenomenon.

One “miracle” had been “confirmed” and Acutis was officially beatified in 2020.

The second “miracle” occurred in 2022. Valeria Valverde had been biking in Florence, Italy (where she attended college), when she fell off and suffered intense head trauma. The prognosis did not look good. A week later, her mother Liliana went to Acutis’ tomb in Assisi… and that was the same day Valeria began to heal. She started breathing on her own, moving her body, and regaining her speech.

On July 18, a CAT scan proved that her hemorrhage had disappeared, and on August 11, Valeria was moved to rehabilitation therapy. She made quick progress, and on September 2, Valeria and Liliana made another pilgrimage to Assisi to thank Blessed Carlo for his intercession.

Was that the natural progression of her injury or something inexplicable? What role did Acutis play in her healing? None, obviously. But it counted!

Here’s the thing about those medical cases: It’s possible there were medical errors and doctors assumed the worst when they may not have had to. It’s possible that the patients could have healed on their own. But the Catholic Church refuses to acknowledge that, replacing the possibility of the unknown with the declaration that Acutis must be the reason they were healed. There’s no room for just admitting, “We’re not entirely sure what happened here but we’re grateful those patients are okay now.” There’s no acknowledging the role doctors and medicine—and not prayer—played in their recoveries. There’s obviously no actual evidence that Acutis directly impacted their health, much less that he’s now performing miracles in his spare time, but it’s much more satisfying to the Vatican to portray him as divine.

But those alleged miracles are why Acutis is now a saint.

Oh. And also, his family happens to be very rich, which allowed them to pay the expenses for finding these supposed miracles and having the Vatican confirm everything, something they freely admit:

Although she had not been drawn on how much was spent, [Acutis’ mother Antonia] Salzano said she bankrolled the process. “Normally the cause for a saint, the people behind it have to ask people to fundraise but in my situation, I do have the means to pay so that is why I have done,” she said.

…

“That’s the key thing about a cause,” said Julian Filochowski, a former director of the Catholic aid agency Cafod…. “If the Pope of the time wants it to happen, it will. There are thousands of candidates for sainthood being considered and a pope’s interest will move someone to the top of the pile.”

In short, there was a lobbying effort to make this kid a saint, and enough money for the Vatican to put its people on the case, and it paid off. Because when you know what outcome you want, you can always work backwards to find justification for it.

One other interesting note: Reporter John Phipps published a piece earlier this year about the short life of Acutis and even spoke to one of his childhood friends. That friend, Phipps wrote, “told me that in life he hadn’t known [Acutis] to behave like a very pious boy. In fact, he hadn’t even known Carlo was religious.”

What about the website he created documenting all those miracles? The friend didn’t see that as anything special:

The hagiographies tell us that faith was the centre of Carlo’s life. His parents may have seen it. But at his Catholic school, his reserve on the subject was so complete that when Carlo told [friend Federico] Oldani he was making a website cataloguing miracles, Oldani saw it more as an expression of his friend’s passion for computer programming than anything else.

None of that takes anything away from Acutis’ life at all. He seems to have been a likable young boy with a promising future and the same interests as everyone else his age. But that’s why it’s all the more tragic to watch people turning him into something supernatural instead of simply appreciating who he actually was.

In many ways, the Catholic Church is using Acutis as a marketing tool more than anything else. They’ve stripped of his (very normal!) humanity and repackaged him as an icon for the digital generation, creating a Catholic mascot that even young people can relate to.

His life isn’t proof of the divine. He deserves far better than to be the subject of a PR campaign that involves incense.

---