Who was St. Carlo Acutis?
Carlo Acutis was born in London on May 3, 1991, to Italian parents, Andrea and Antonia, who were working there. He was baptized two weeks later at Our Lady of Dolours, and that September the family moved to Milan, where he grew up. He made his First Communion at seven, on June 16, 1998, at a monastery outside Milan, and from then on, Vatican News says, he went to Mass every day and made a spiritual communion when he could not. "The Eucharist is my highway to heaven," he said. Pope Leo XIV quoted another of his sayings at the canonization: "In front of the sun, you get a tan. In front of the Eucharist, you become a saint!"
He was a normal boy. Pope Leo said he "grew up naturally integrating prayer, sport, study and charity into his days." He loved sport. He helped classmates who were struggling and gave part of his pocket money to poor people in the neighborhood. He spent summers in Assisi and loved it. He taught himself to build websites while serving as a catechist in his parish, Santa Maria Segreta, and used what he learned for the Church: in 2006 he built a site for a school volunteering project. At fourteen he designed a virtual exhibition on Eucharistic miracles that is still shown around the world. Pope Francis, writing about him in 2019, said "he knew how to use the new communications technology to transmit the Gospel, to communicate values and beauty," and quoted a line Carlo used about the pressure to conform: "everyone is born as an original, but many people end up dying as photocopies."
In the first days of October 2006 he came down with what looked like flu. On October 8 the doctors in Milan diagnosed an acute, fulminant leukemia. He was moved to the San Gerardo hospital in Monza the next day. On October 10 he asked for the Anointing of the Sick and Communion. Vatican News says he offered what he was suffering for the Pope and for the Church. On October 11 a brain hemorrhage put him into a coma, and his heart stopped at 6:45 on the morning of October 12, 2006. He was fifteen.
He was buried first in the family tomb at Ternengo and, as he had asked, moved to Assisi in January 2007. Since 2019 his body has rested in the Sanctuary of the Spoliation there. His cause opened in 2012; Pope Francis declared him Venerable on July 5, 2018, and he was beatified in Assisi on October 10, 2020, after a healing in Brazil was recognized. A second healing, in Florence in 2022, opened the way to canonization. On September 7, 2025, in St. Peter's Square, before more than eighty thousand people, Pope Leo XIV declared him a saint together with Pier Giorgio Frassati.
Why Catholics pray to St. Carlo Acutis for young people, faith and healing
No document names Carlo patron of anything. He is often called patron of the internet, and the title is understandable, but it is popular devotion, not a decree, and this page says so. What the Church has said is narrower and stronger. Pope Francis offered him to young people as a model for the digital age, and Pope Leo said that he and Frassati "are an invitation to all of us, especially young people."
Parents pray to him for their children. Many are raising kids in a world of screens, and here is a saint who had the same screens and used them to show people the Eucharist. He is not a saint who rejected the internet. He is a saint it did not own. Pope Leo recalled that Carlo "marveled" that "people are so concerned with the beauty of their bodies and do not care about the beauty of their souls." Parents whose teenager has drifted from the faith ask Carlo, who went to Mass daily at an age when most children have to be made to go, to pray for them.
Young people pray to him because he is one of them. He died at fifteen. His sayings are short enough to fit on a phone: "Not I, but God." "Sadness is looking at yourself; happiness is looking at God." He said, Pope Leo recalled, that "the only thing we really have to fear is sin," and that "heaven has always been waiting for us."
And people pray to him for healing, above all for a sick child. The two miracles the Church accepted for his beatification and canonization were healings. And he was himself a child who was sick, who had four days between the diagnosis and the end, and who used them to ask for the sacraments and to offer what he had for others.
How to pray to St. Carlo Acutis
His memorial is October 12, the day of his death. It is not on the General Roman Calendar; it is kept in the Diocese of Assisi and wherever communities ask for it, and Vatican News reported after the beatification that "the Church celebrates the liturgical memorial of Carlo Acutis on October 12." A novena runs October 3 to 11. If you can get to Assisi, his tomb at the Sanctuary of the Spoliation draws pilgrims from around the world, and the Diocese of Assisi marks the feast with several days of Masses.
Say the prayer below. Then do what he did: go to Mass, or make a spiritual communion if you cannot; spend ten minutes before the tabernacle; go to Confession. If you are a parent, pray it with your child's name in it. If you are the child, pray it in your own words; he was fifteen, and he would not have minded the grammar.
If you are praying for someone with cancer or leukemia, prayer goes alongside the doctors and the treatment; it does not replace them. Carlo was in a hospital, under doctors, when he asked for the sacraments.