Overview

• Pope Leo XIV canonized Carlo Acutis in St. Peter’s Square before a crowd reported at roughly 70,000–90,000, with Italy’s president and the teen’s family in attendance as his mother presented a heart relic.
• The Congregation for the Causes of Saints recognized two healings credited to Acutis: a Brazilian boy’s 2013 recovery from a congenital pancreatic condition and a Costa Rican student’s 2022 turnaround after a severe brain injury.
• Acutis, who died of aggressive leukemia at 15 in 2006, was known for building websites and a widely viewed online exhibit of Eucharistic miracles that fueled his reputation as the “influencer of God.”
• The canonization was celebrated jointly with Pier Giorgio Frassati, a 20th‑century Italian layman renowned for service to the poor.
• Originally slated for April, the rite was postponed after Pope Francis’s death and became a signature early moment of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, intensifying pilgrimages to Acutis’s tomb in Assisi and inspiring new initiatives such as a chapel under construction in Mendoza, Argentina.