Pope Leo makes ‘God’s Influencer’ the first Gen Z saint: St Peter’s Square fills for canonisation of British-born Carlo Acutis, the son of a Kensington banker

Pope Leo XIV has officially canonised 15-year-old London-born Carlo Acutis, making him Britain’s first Gen Z saint.  

Scores of faithful arrived in St Peter’s Square this morning for the Pope’s first canonisation ceremony, where he declared the teenage computer whiz who died in 2006 of an acute case of leukemia, and Italian Pier Giorgio Frassati, saints, as thousands of worshippers gathered to witness the historic event.

Images from the Vatican show the altar adorned with a gold antependium, papal insignia, and large tapestries bearing the images of the two new saints – Frassati on the left, Acutis on the right.  

The ceremony drew tens of thousands of attendees, including many millennials and young families. Other cardinals, bishops, and priests from around the world also travelled to join in concelebration with the Pope, while the Sistine Chapel Choir, directed by Marcos Pavan, leads the music. 

More than a million people are estimated to have made a pilgrimage to the Italian hilltop town of Assisi where Carlo’s body lies, preserved in wax. 

The Vatican said 36 cardinals, 270 bishops and hundreds of priests had signed up to celebrate the Mass along with Leo in a sign of the saints’ enormous appeal to the hierarchy and ordinary faithful alike. 

Earlier images from Vatican City showed hundreds of pilgrims lining the streets in tents and sleeping bags as they queued to enter for the long-awaited event.

Dozens of faithful were also spotted with banners and posters depicting the teen Saint in Rome as they celebrate the life of the young ‘Little Buddha’. Many travelled to the capital via a special train from Assisi.

Dubbed ‘God’s Influencer’ and a fan of computer games, Acutis taught himself basic coding and used it to document miracles and other elements of the Catholic faith online. 

Acutis’s body, dressed in jeans and a pair of Nike trainers, lies in a glass-walled tomb in Assisi, visited by hundreds of thousands of people a year. 

His canonisation, initially set for April but postponed when Pope Francis died, will also be watched by faithful on giant screens in Assisi, a medieval city and pilgrimage site in the central region of Umbria.

The teenager, born on May 3, 1991, to an Italian mother and a half-English, half-Italian banker father, had an ardent faith, though his parents were not particularly devout.

He grew up in the northern city of Milan, where he attended mass daily and had a reputation for kindness to bullied children and homeless people, bringing the latter food and sleeping bags.

In Milan, he took care of his parish website and later that of a Vatican-based academy where he spread the message of Catholicism.

At age 11, he read captivating stories about wine turning to blood in Croatian castles and how in Colombia priests stopped approaching tsunamis by holding up reliquaries. 

He would then up these tales and posting them on his website, which he had designed to document miracles and stories about saints. 

Antonia Salzano, his mother, said her son had a ‘special relationship’ with God from an early age, even though her family was not religious.

Aged seven, Acutis wrote: ‘My life plan is to be always close to Jesus’.

It was a commitment he would carry with him throughout his life before it was cut short by cancer of the blood in 2006.

Carlo’s diagnosis with leukaemia in October 2006 came as a horrifying shock.

The disease can take several forms but affects the blood cells in bone marrow.

Symptoms include tiredness, bruising and bleeding, repeated infections and high temperatures, per Blood Cancer UK.

The disease overwhelmingly affects young people. While it is not currently curable, it is possible to treat.

In spite of his diagnosis, Carlo reassured his parents: ‘I’m happy to die because I’ve lived my life without wasting even a minute of it doing things that wouldn’t have pleased God.’

Carlo Acutis died on October 12, 2006.

In Catholicism, saints are defined as people in heaven who lived righteous lives and used their faith to help others, and in order to become a saint, the individual needs two miracles verified after their death. 

The Vatican has recognised Acutis as performing two miracles himself since his death – a necessary step on the path to sainthood. 

The first was the healing of a Brazilian child suffering from a rare pancreatic malformation, the second the recovery of a Costa Rican student seriously injured in an accident.

In 2012, the Brazilian boy suffering from a rare pancreatic disorder named Mattheus Vianna visited Carlo’s grave in Assisi.

Mattheus, who struggled to keep food down and was seriously underweight, claims to have placed his hand on one of Carlo’s relics in church and said: ‘I wish I could stop vomiting’.

To his amazement, the act completely cured him, and the boy was able to eat normally again, leaving doctors in disbelief.

In 2014, medical tests confirmed the boy’s complete healing and in 2020, the Vatican accepted the incident as a miracle attributed to Carlo and announced that the teenager would be beatified – a crucial step on the path to sainthood.

Then, in 2022, a young Costa Rican student called Valeria Valverde suffered a critical head injury after getting into a cycling accident in Florence.

Her anguished mother travelled to Assisi and prayed to his tomb.

After her visit, Valeria began to breathe on her own and make a full recover, a result which was later recognised by Pope Francis as the second miracle needed for Carlo’s canonisation.

In both cases, relatives had prayed for help from the teenager, who was named ‘venerable’ in 2018 before being declared ‘blessed’ in 2020.

It was the London-born teenager’s final wish to be buried in Assisi, the home of his 13th-century idol Saint Francis, who dedicated his life to the care of the poor.

Canonisation is the result of a long and meticulous process, involving an investigation by the Vatican and specialists who assess whether the obligatory miracles have taken place.

Final approval rests with the pope.

Italian Pier Giorgio Frassati, a mountaineering enthusiast who died in 1925 and was known for his social and spiritual commitment, will also be made a saint on Sunday.

His casket is inscribed with the words ‘Verso l’alto’ (‘To the heights’), a phrase he wrote on a photograph taken of him looking up to the summit while mountaineering.

An engineering student who made it his mission to serve the poor and sick of his city, he was held up by the Church as a model of charity after his death of polio aged 24.

He was beatified by John Paul II in 1990.

The Vatican recognised the necessary second miracle to put him on the path to sainthood in 2024, with the unexplained healing of a young American man in a coma.