Under the shadow of St. Peter’s dome: a new kind of saint for a wired world
On a clear Roman morning, St. Peter’s Square felt more like a global village than the centre of a city. Flags from distant parishes fluttered beside backpacks, teenagers with earbuds threaded under their scarves stood shoulder to shoulder with nuns in habits older than the century. The Vatican estimated roughly 80,000 people had come to witness what many described as a hinge moment between ancient ritual and contemporary life: the canonisation of Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati.
The scene was all texture—tapestries unfurled across the basilica’s façade, papal banners catching the breeze, the smell of roasting chestnuts from nearby vendors mixing with incense. Smartphones lifted in unison produced a soft constellation of screens. English, Spanish, Tagalog, Italian, Portuguese and Polish stitched the air into a dozen conversations. “It felt like every continent had a seat in that piazza,” said Maria Lopez, a pilgrim from Colombia. “I came for the moment, but I stay for the people.”
“God’s Influencer”: a teenager in jeans and trainers
Carlo Acutis is not the sort of saint most art historians would have painted. Born in London in 1991 to Italian parents and raised in Milan, he died at 15 in 2006 after a brief battle with leukaemia. Yet his preserved body—dressed in jeans and Nike trainers—lies in a glass-walled tomb in Assisi and has become a destination for nearly one million pilgrims in the last year alone, according to the local diocese.
“Carlo was a normal teenager,” said Antonia Salzano, his mother, speaking quietly after the Mass. “He loved football. He loved computer games. But he loved the Eucharist more than anything. He believed that holiness is for everyone.”
Where older models of sainthood were forged in monasteries or on battlefields, Acutis built his devotion at a keyboard. A self-taught coder, he documented Eucharistic miracles online and taught friends how to merge their digital talents with their spiritual lives. That blending earned him the nickname that trailed in news reports and social feeds: “God’s Influencer.” Whether you find that label charming or jarring, it carries a simple truth—the Church is acknowledging that sanctity can be cultivated within the architecture of contemporary culture.
Miracles, the paperwork of heaven
Canonisation is not folkloric adoration: it is a painstaking process of investigation that, in modern practice, typically looks for two verified miracles attributed to the candidate’s intercession. For Acutis, Vatican investigators recorded two recoveries that doctors could not fully explain: firstly, the healing of a young Brazilian child born with a rare pancreatic malformation; secondly, the recovery of a Costa Rican student who survived serious injuries after an accident. In both cases, family members said they prayed to Carlo.
- Miracle 1: Brazilian child with pancreatic malformation (healing attributed to Acutis)
- Miracle 2: Costa Rican student, serious injuries reversed (also attributed)
“Science and faith are not enemies,” said Father Marco Bernini, a Vatican official involved with the cause. “The Church’s tribunals examine medical records, call experts, and weigh testimony. When doctors say there is no medical explanation, the Church acknowledges what the people of faith have experienced.”
Pier Giorgio Frassati: the mountaineer of charity
The other figure today lifted to the altars was Pier Giorgio Frassati, an earlier kind of youthful luminary. Born in 1901 and dying in 1925 of poliomyelitis at age 24, Frassati was an engineering student who spent weekends climbing the Alps and weekdays caring for the poor of Turin. His life—equal parts risk on the rock faces and risk for the destitute—has long been a touchstone for young Catholics drawn to action as prayer.
“Pier Giorgio taught that joy and service are bedfellows,” said Sister Lucia Pellegrino, who runs a shelter in Turin inspired by Frassati’s example. “He was irreverent, and he was real. That is why young people still come to him.”
For Frassati, the second miracle needed for sainthood was recognised in 2024: the unexplained healing of a young American man who had been in a coma. With that recognition, the path was clear for today’s elevation.
What this moment says about youth, faith and the internet
Look closer and you’ll see patterns that explain why two young men—one a mountaineer, one a coder—were chosen now. Nearly 1.3 billion people identify as Catholic worldwide. Yet the Church, like many long-standing institutions, is wrestling with how to retain the attention of a generation whose attention is fragmented across apps, global crises and rising secularism. Carlo’s story answers an anxious question: Can holiness be visible in the lived, messy middle of everyday modern life?
“I told my friends about Carlo on Instagram,” said Eleanor Hauser, a 15-year-old American on a school trip. “They laughed—then they Googled him. That’s how it works now. Faith travels through networks as much as it does through catechism books.”
Experts point out that this is not merely a PR move. “Canonising younger models is a pastoral strategy and a theological statement,” said Dr. Emiliano Rossi, a theologian at the Gregorian University. “It signals to youth that sanctity is not the exclusive domain of elders or monks; it can be lived in school corridors, soccer pitches, and online forums.”
Faces in the crowd: local color and human stories
There were simple, human moments that the cameras missed. A vendor from Trastevere joked about the spike in sales of rosaries and espresso. A retired teacher from Poland sobbed quietly as she displayed a battered photo of Carlo clipped to a rosary she’d carried for years. Young Italians compared pilgrimage routes to hiking maps—Assisi versus Rome—while a Brazilian mother traced the name of the child healed by Carlo’s intercession on her palm.
“He’s not a statue to me,” said Filippo Bellaviti, 17, who came from Milan. “He’s someone who shows faith can fit inside homework and football practice. That’s hopeful.”
Beyond the rituals: questions to take home
Standing beneath tapestries that showed both young saints, one felt the pull of larger questions: What does holiness look like in an age of screens, algorithms, and global churn? How do communities form meaning today, and who gets to be a model? The canonisation of Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati asks us to expand our imagination of virtue—toward courage, yes, but also toward creativity, compassion, and the courage to be ordinary and extraordinary at once.
Are saints suddenly more relatable because they wore jeans or scaled mountains? Or is this a deeper call—to see divine possibility in skills and passions we might otherwise consign to the mundane? As you read this, somewhere someone is livestreaming a Mass, teaching a prayer on TikTok, or knitting a scarf for a stranger. Small acts. Big faith.
Whether you stand within Rome’s cobblestoned squares or watch the ceremony from a living room halfway across the world, the message reverberates: sanctity adapts to culture, but it never loses its essentials. It asks for kindness. It asks for courage. And, increasingly, it asks us to notice where the sacred and the secular quietly intersect.
