Carlo Acutis and those teenage saints

“There will be saints amongst the children” (St Pius X)

“Now you must know that Pinocchio, amongst his friends and schoolmates, had one favourite and very dear friend… Lucignolo was the laziest and most mischievous boy in the whole school: but Pinocchio was very fond of him.” Collodi would not have written such a masterpiece had he not possessed the genius to understand what it means to be human, even when disguised as something inhuman or transhuman – a metamorphosis in the style of Apuleius. And the genius to realise that the very essence of life is loving. Something possible only on condition that one is, first and foremost, loved oneself. To believe that a piece of wood can become a little boy who loves is no small insight: it is as valid as believing in the possibility that a teenager – a girl or a boy, a child – a handful of years not yet come of age – can become a saint. No more fairy tales; these are stories that happen in real life.

Next Sunday, health permitting, Pope Francis will preside over the canonisation of a teenager, a young saint. And what’s more, not from some ancient era or distant lands where one becomes a martyr, but always by the grace of God, without even having to cross the road from home. Like the teenage martyrs of Tlaxcala, indigenous Mexicans from the 16th century canonised by Bergoglio in 2017. This, however, is a saint of our own time and place, even from a well-to-do and respectable family, whose life seemed to follow a ‘normal’ course and whose very ‘iconography’ (it feels odd to speak of iconography when referring to a millennial, doesn’t it?) consists of a polo shirt, his curls, the Nike trainers in which he was buried and which can be seen today through a glass display case in the Sanctuary of the Stripping in Assisi, available for the prayers of thousands of pilgrims (countless young people) and even via a live stream on the official website dedicated to him. ‘The first millennial saint’, as the press puts it; ‘the patron saint of the internet and social media’, as the Church describes him. Carlo Acutis was famous even before Pope Francis announced in 2024 that he would be canonised (the canonical process requires the recognition of two miracles). But not because of his curls and polo shirt, nor because he had creatively used digital tools to connect with hundreds of his peers. Rather, because that ability to act – the travelling online exhibition he created to recount the ‘Eucharistic miracles’, that is, those linked to the sacrament; we only remember the one at Bolsena, but there are over a hundred – was the reflection of a simple, happy, transparent life. A holiness – the help he gave to the poor, as attested by many, starting with those in his parish in the centre of Milan, a stone’s throw from the Jesuit secondary school where he studied – which had inspired so many classmates and friends. What was his magic formula? None.

Some observers question whether he came from a wealthy, influential family, which might have smoothed his path to sainthood; others doubt that the Church was so quick to declare him a saint and a role model for young people—a narrative that strikes some as overly contrived, much like that of Saint Maria Goretti in her day. These are legitimate observations and counter-arguments. However, his (Catholic) parents were not exactly churchgoers (“My son left us speechless because, at first, my husband and I weren’t practising Catholics,” said Carlo’s mother). Anyone who has read about him, or witnessed the procession of young people at the Spogliazione, can see that the appeal of a teenager who died of fulminant leukemia in three days defies these parameters. A teenager of the third millennium—or rather a ‘pre-teen’—who writes, ‘sadness is looking inwards; happiness is looking towards God’, and who explains to his peers that ‘the Eucharist is my motorway to paradise’, does not fit into any mould, not even that of religious education. And yet he was credible to his friends; and yet his parents followed this incomprehensible miracle, which is even more astonishing than the two recognised by the specialists at the ‘Factory of Saints’. After all, even Pietro di Bernardone was not exactly a devout worshipper when his son stripped naked right there, in that church in Assisi where thousands now flock to see Carlo, and drew his enthusiastic friends along with him.

Could such young men and women ever exist? Like Rossella Petrellese, a young woman from Acerra who died at the age of twenty-two in 1994, whose life was marked by illness but who inspired a charitable movement for the sick, for which she was recognised as a ‘Servant of God’? It is not that they cannot exist, it is that we do not believe in them, and therefore they do not believe in themselves either. The text that defines the moment – and fuels social anxiety – is Adolescence. We adults live in a world where we look at, or rather scrutinise, those monsters who are no longer even our own, without understanding them. The story of the ‘incel’ lad who killed his peer, by whom he felt defeated, is the ultimate embodiment of what we no longer even consider a ‘youth issue’, but rather a genetic mutation. What have they become? Why aren’t they like they used to be? These are the comments and questions bouncing around in families and in the newspapers. The questions that prompt experts and gurus to emerge in droves, to explain in books and at conferences who these beings are and how to deal with them as they roam the house and run riot on social media. Sometimes violent, sometimes depressed, sometimes hikikomori. The news is rife with violent incidents. The TV series Adolescence has merely highlighted a perception: the terror of social media, that bodiless bubble that dictates unreal identities. We are poor in life and full of instruction manuals.

In the last film Bernardo Bertolucci left us, Io e te, the protagonist is a ‘troubled’ teenager, an ‘incel’ ahead of his time. He obsessively stares at a glass display case containing insects. Could it be that adults behave towards him in the same way – like cold, detached entomologists? The soundtrack is Ragazzo solo, ragazza sola, the cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity: “Planet Earth is blue / And there’s nothing I can do”. This is, with varying degrees of optimism or pessimism, what we think young people might be like: “There’s nothing I can do”. Much has been made of the long take used to film the four episodes of Adolescence, highlighting its somewhat vintage virtuosity. Technical skill aside, Philip Barantini’s long takes have the same value and serve the same purpose as Bertolucci’s glass case: to convey the visual impression that there is no escape and no way out – that is the entirety of the reality available to them. Just as it is, without any breaks. There is no way out of it; they cannot escape.

Then there are lives such as that of Chiara Luce Badano, who grew up within the Focolare Movement and died at the age of 18; she was beatified in 2010 for ‘her dedication to caring for children and the elderly and her heroic conduct in the face of illness’. On 3 August – at the end of the Youth Jubilee – another young man will be canonised: Pier Giorgio Frassati, best known for his public work and his family background – the secular upper middle class of Turin. He died aged 24; he was a Dominican tertiary, a member of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, and a leader of the FUCI. For him too – the scion of a great family with a bright future in the world – his family background, social circle and education counted for nothing. There was nothing to suggest he was destined for sainthood.

And this is precisely what is so astonishing. Cecilia Sala, with her hugely popular podcast, set out to investigate the Acutis phenomenon. She, too, wonders about the young people who look up to him as a role model: “They can’t say exactly what Carlo did to become a saint.” And ultimately, that is the crucial question, the real one: nobody knows. Curiously, the question posed by Cecilia is the very same one that the man born blind provocatively asks the Pharisees who are questioning him: “This is what is strange: that you do not know where that man comes from, yet he has opened my eyes.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be back for lunch.” It is Saturday 5 November 2011. These were the last words spoken at home by Marco Gallo, a 17-year-old sixth-former from Monza. “At 9 o’clock in the morning, the Carabinieri turned up and informed us of Marco’s death.” A motorbike accident. The cause for Marco’s beatification was opened in 2024, during a pilgrimage to the shrine of Montallegro in Rapallo – the place where his family used to holiday – attended by 800 young people; Marco was a member of the ‘Giessini’ youth group. Marco’s story is another one that, on the surface, seems ordinary. We know it from his diaries and the testimonies of his friends, which have been published (Marco Gallo. Anche i sassi si sarebbero messi a saltellare, Itaca). A few days earlier, a friend of his had died in the same way, in an accident. Is there a psychologist or entomologist who can explain this? There is the account of his sister and his mother, which does not explain but sheds light on the matter. She did not have the strength to enter “that room,” but she had to, to gather his clothes. “Let’s choose his Stand by Me T-shirt, with the photo of Matteo’s call and the words from Pope Benedict’s first speech: ‘He gives everything and takes nothing away.’ I sat on Marco’s bed and asked, ‘But what’s written on the wall?’” We notice the writing. I know for certain it wasn’t there on Friday morning. Right next to the bed, near the crucifix, Marco had written in pencil: ‘Why do you seek the living amongst the dead?’”. It is the phrase that the angels at the tomb say to the doubting women, who are even frightened by it, as recounted in the Gospel of Luke. For no one can utter such a phrase, let alone at the age of seventeen, unless “it has been given to him from on high”, as Jesus says to the sceptic par excellence, Pilate. “The story of Marco’s death says it all,” reflects Father Pierluigi Banna, a young theologian and vice-postulator in the cause of Marco Gallo: “My understanding is that these young people, particularly Marco, show us a working of Grace that is far deeper than we can imagine. A working that is revealed only when the seed falls to the ground and dies.” One does not become a saint by virtue of one’s past. Holiness is always recognised by an unexpected impact. The only answer Cecilia Sala finds, in her podcast, is: “Ultimately, there is always just one word: hope”.

It came as a surprise that Carlo Acutis was canonised so quickly. And, above all, at such a young age. In truth, this ‘fast track’ is not all that unusual. One need only glance at a directory of the saints of the Catholic Church. It lists over two hundred, categorised from infancy up to the age of 25, and there are just as many names of those who have not been raised to the altars but are remembered ‘in the reputation of holiness’. The history of the Church is by no means lacking in child saints and young saints (incidentally, even Cossiga’s poor joke about the ‘young judge’ turned out to be a prophecy: Rosario Livatino was beatified as a martyr ‘in odium fidei’ in 2021). Some are as ancient as the Roman Tarcisius, whilst others are more recent, such as Dominic Savio, one of the first pupils of St John Bosco, the son of a blacksmith and a seamstress, born in a farmhouse and who died at the age of fourteen. Or Thérèse of Lisieux, who died at the age of 24, famous for having gone to see the Pope whilst still a child to ask to be allowed to enter the convent early, and now a ‘Doctor of the Church’ on a par with Augustine and Thomas. “La santità non è un bollino di certificazione da applicare su una vita, è piuttosto una vita nella quale risplende la testimonianza di Gesù, e tale testimonianza è stata evidente a quanti abbiano avuto la ventura di incrociarne la strada,” wrote the journalist Pina Baglioni in a precious little book that takes its title from a prophetic phrase by Pope Pius X, during a time of great turmoil for Christianity: There Will Be Saints Among the Children (Paoline), in which she recounts the stories of some of them. The ancient prophecy of Pius X and the canonisation of Acutis are linked by a reason far more evident than the communicative urgency of a bewildered Catholic institution struggling to attract young people through sterile moralistic or voluntaristic appeals. It is the testimony that the appeal of holiness lies elsewhere, making possible what is, for entomologists, inconceivable. Pina Baglioni recounts, for example, the story of Manuel Foderà, a boy from Calatafimi who died aged nine in 2010, and of how the hearts of countless people were moved by his simple, innocent faith. The stories of the child saints of the modern era are striking. One such child, to whom fervent devotion is paid in ‘her’ church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome, was called Antonietta Meo – known to everyone as ‘Nennolina’ – who died at the age of just seven but was soon declared ‘venerable’ for her faith, which had stirred the hearts of everyone who knew her. “They cannot say exactly what Carlo did to become a saint.” Even Marco Gallo’s friends did not know precisely, but as Cecilia puts it: “His enthusiasm infected everyone – girls, boys, the elderly, the whole neighbourhood was abuzz… Something beautiful was happening; otherwise, Marco would not have been there.” Von Balthasar wrote in Perception of Form: “In a world that no longer believes itself capable of affirming beauty, arguments in favour of truth have exhausted their power of logical conclusion.”

There is another piece of graffiti on the wall that no adult entomologist will ever be able to stop from being written. In "Rusty the Savage" ("Rumble Fish"), Coppola’s magnificent little film, that graffiti dominates the walls: "The Motorcycle Boy Reigns". The dream of an invincible brother who cannot be destroyed. Rusty steals an aquarium containing the two rumble fish that fascinate him: two Siamese fish forced to wage war on one another, like two caged teenagers. In the end, he sets them free in the river, and this decision will cost him his life. In Benigni’s Pinocchio, there is a brief scene that is worth the whole film. When he finds the donkey Lucignolo dying, Pinocchio calls him, with great affection, ‘great soul!’. Great soul. It is an expression that does not appear in Collodi’s original; rather, it recalls Dante’s ‘spiriti magni’. ‘He loved him dearly.’ One is a great soul not by merit, but by having been loved. No teenager, whether today or of any age, a great soul, could write on a wall ‘why do you seek among the dead the one who is alive?’ without that childlike, naive boldness of children to whom ‘God spoke through the events that took place’.