FROM THE HILL: Pope Leo XIV on Sunday canonized the first two saints of his pontificate, including a 15-year-old who sought to use technology to spread his faith.
Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006, is the first millennial to be canonized as a saint. Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died in 1925 at 24 years old, was also made a saint on Sunday.
Tens of thousands of people gathered in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday to celebrate the new saints.
The Guardian reports that Carlo Acutis “built multilingual websites to spread Catholic teaching, later earning him the nickname ‘God’s influencer.’ The young man died of leukaemia.
There has been special devotion aimed at Acutis, with merchandise bearing his image are being sold in the form of action figures, T-shirts, mobile phone stickers, and handheld fans.
From the Guardian:
Over the past year, more than 1 million people have flocked to the central Italian town of Assisi, where Acutis’s body – covered in a wax mould of his likeness and dressed in his blue tracksuit top, jeans and trainers – is on view behind a glass-panelled case in Santa Maria Maggiore church. His heart is in a gold casket in the town’s San Rufino Cathedral, while pieces of tissue from his pericardium – the membrane enclosing the heart – have toured the world in the lead-up to his canonisation. A bronze lifesize statue of him is also on display in the town.
A hour before the mass, St Peter’s Square had filled with tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the world, many of them millennial Italians and Americans, as Acutis’s family looked on.
A crowd numbering an estimated 80,000 braved sweltering heat, and many were forced to spill out into the boulevards next to the square, with witnesses describing the atmosphere as joyous and party-like.
To achieve sainthood, two miracles must be attributed to a person. For Acutis, the first miracle was the healing of a Brazilian child suffering from a rare pancreatic malformation.
The second miracle was a Costa Rican student who recovered after a serious injury in an accident.
In both cases, relatives say they prayed for help from Acutis.
He was beatified (declared “Blessed”) in 2020 by former Pope Francis.
Pier Giorgio Frassati, the second person raised to sainthood Sunday, is considered a model of charity by the Church
Vatican News reports that Frassati “lived as a friend of Christ and a brother to all, by name and by choice.”
The outlet goes on the explain that Frassati’s story “is told through the voices of Catholic Action members from Italy, Spain, and Argentina—young people and leaders who call him both brother and teacher of everyday life.”
He is described as being holy and prayerful, a young man who “lived politics as a form of civic passion, ‘always in service of the common good, starting with the least.’”
Frassati was born to a wealthy family, but he “lived frugally and gave his money—and several times even the shoes or coat he was wearing—to the poor,” according to the Frassati Catholic High School website.
“His father was an agnostic, an Italian senator and the founder of a liberal newspaper,” the site reveals. “Neither he nor his wife were very affectionate with their children. Frassati’s parents disapproved of his faith, but this did not keep him from his daily Mass and rosary, and sometimes whole nights of Eucharistic adoration. He was often scolded for being late for meals, but he never revealed that his tardiness was due to feeding the poor, running errands to buy them medicine, or finding widows and their children a place to stay for the night.
“The few times that his parents caught Pier Giorgio giving his things away, they punished him.”
On July 4, 1925, he died after contracting poliomyelitis (polio) while tending to sick and poor inhabitants of Turin, Italy.
On May 20, 1990, he was beatified by former Pope John Paul II.
The miracles attributed to Frassati are the healing of a young American seminarian in the 1980s and the miraculous recovery of a Dutch man with an incurable disease. He was also recently recognized for the healing of an American seminarian, Father Juan Manuel Gutierrez, who suffered a severe ankle injury after playing basketball. In all cases, the afflicted prayed to Frassati.
During the celebration of the two new saints, the surging crowds included many young faces, celebrating the effectiveness of young people of faith.
Leo commented on the crowd before the Mass, saying, “I’m happy to see so many young people.”
“The greatest risk in life is to waste it outside of God’s plan,” Leo said during the Mass.
The new saints “are an invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards and make them masterpieces,” he added.
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