Carlo Acutis
"The Eucharist: My Highway to Heaven.”
Born in London on 3 May 1991 to Italian parents Andrea Acutis and Antonia Salzano; the family settled in Milan soon after, and Carlo grew up there as a typical middle-class Italian boy before his death from leukaemia in 2006, aged 15.
❤️Known For
Nicknamed “God’s Influencer” and popularly called the patron saint of the Internet, for teaching himself computer programming and building a website that catalogued Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions from around the world. He is the official patron of computer programmers and of youth, and is the first millennial to be canonised (2025).
👣An Ordinary Person Like Us
What is striking is how normal his life looked. He played football, enjoyed video games (in moderation), owned a PlayStation, loved his dog, watched films, and taught himself coding like any tech-savvy teenager — he was not a monk, a mystic, or someone who performed dramatic public miracles in his lifetime. His holiness grew inside an ordinary childhood and adolescence, built on small daily habits: Mass, the rosary, and helping classmates who were bullied.
🤲✨Values Exemplified
Faithfulness in everyday life, and using one’s ordinary talents (here, technology) in service of God. Carlo is remembered for urging people to be “originals, not photocopies,” exemplifying authenticity, humility, and consistency between belief and daily action.
🕯️📖Reflection on the Life of Saint Carlo Acutis
Carlo’s story resonates today because his “ordinary world” — screens, games, coding — is the same world most young people live in now. He shows that the tools we spend our time on are not obstacles to holiness but can become instruments for it, and that sainthood is less about doing something spectacular once than about showing up faithfully, day after day, in the life we’ve actually been given.
Join us for Saints Come Marching In on Saturday, 31 Oct. Check out the details of the event and register here.