In a see-through safe carved into a wall behind the altar of a chapel in northern Rome lies a collection of relics of Carlo Acutis. These include a splinter from his wooden bed, a fragment of a jumper and a piece of the sheet used to cover him after his death. Locks of his hair are on display in other churches in the Italian capital and beyond.
Acutis, the London-born Italian who on Sunday will become the Catholic church’s first millennial saint, built websites to spread Catholic teaching, earning him the nickname “God’s Influencer” after his death, aged 15, from leukaemia.
Shrines such as this form part of an ancient ritual bestowed upon the church’s highest-ranking dead and will provide believers with tangible reminders of his life. Minuscule though the relics at Sant’Angela Merici are, Danilo Spagnoletti, the parish priest, believes they help instil courage in pilgrims.
“Praying close to a saint’s remains helps them to face difficulties in life,” he said. “In particular, this saint, who had a short life but was far advanced in many ways, is a source of inspiration for young people.”
Acutis, who died in 2006, will be canonised by Pope Leo alongside Pier Giorgio Frassati, another young Catholic activist who died a century ago. The event is expected to bring thousands of people to Rome.
The church categorises relics of its saints into first, second and third class. Those at Sant’Angela Merici fall into the latter two, and while the items attract a steady flow of pilgrims, it is the first-class relics – a saint’s body and its parts – that pull in the crowds.
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.
His mother, Antonia Salzano, has also travelled across the globe, delivering speeches to Catholic communities about her son’s life, bringing strands of her son’s hair as gifts.
The relics have been donated by his family, although once he is canonised they will become the possession of the Vatican.
Acutis was born in London, where his father worked in insurance, before the family moved to Milan when he was four months old.
The family was not necessarily religious, Salzano told the Guardian, but her son showed a deep devotion to the Catholic faith from a young age.
“He would go to mass and do the rosary each day,” she said, adding that he was a child who “could not be indifferent to sorrow”. “We lived in the centre of Milan in a building surrounded by beggars. He wanted to help them, speak to them, bring them food and blankets.”
She added that Acutis was otherwise an average child, hanging out with friends or playing sports. A skilful coder, his whiz-kid reputation started to grow when he created websites for Catholic organisations, including one that listed miracles. He enjoyed playing on his PlayStation too, although limited its use to an hour a week. “Carlo was an internet geek, but he had the temperance to use technology for good, and was not exploited by it,” said his mother.
The movement that had built up around Acutis was evident from the day he died, as seriously ill people began praying to him for cures. His funeral was attended by a host of people he had helped, among them immigrants and bullied children.
His mother claims it was around the time of his funeral that he started to work miracles, and last year the late Pope Francis credited Acutis with two. The first, the Vatican said, involved the recovery of a boy in Brazil from a rare congenital disease affecting his pancreas; the second was the healing of a student in Florence with bleeding on the brain after suffering a head trauma, and whose mother had prayed at Acutis’s tomb in Assisi.
The speed at which Acutis has been canonised, especially when compared with Frassati, is part of the church’s quest to attract more young people to the faith.
While non-Catholics might regard venerating the relics as bizarre or even gruesome, it appeals to a lot of people, especially the young.
“That’s exactly the point,” said Andrea Vreede, Vatican correspondent for NOS, the Dutch public radio and TV network. “The church wants to have a young saint who is a millennial, somebody who belongs to the modern age.”
She drew a parallel with Maria Goretti, who was born into poverty in 1890 and brutally assaulted at the age of 11 in Nettuno, south of Rome, by a farmhand after refusing his advances. The church claims Goretti died from her wounds after forgiving her assailant. She became a saint in 1950.
“She died peacefully and devotedly and that was it,” said Vreede. “She was turned into a perfect saint because they needed a role model for young women, especially after the second world war, to re-establish morality.”
But as much as Acutis has gathered a huge following, with criminals exploiting the fascination and attempting to sell relics purported to be his online, there has been criticism about the buzz created around him.
“There have been questions raised about how appropriate it is for the church to idealise him as a supermodel,” said Vreede.
Supermodel or not, his mother believes his relics are a reminder that “each one of us is called upon to become holy”. “Carlo reminds us that it’s possible for everyone to become a saint,” she said.
