As a child growing up in Milan, Carlo Acutis collected stories of miracles. He wrote about the time when, in 1411, wine turned to blood in a castle chapel in Ludbreg, Croatia; of how, in 1630, a pastor in Canosio, Italy, saved his town from a flood by blessing the raging waters; of how, in 1906, a priest on the island of Tumaco, Colombia, held up a reliquary on the beach to stop an approaching tsunami. Acutis, 11 years old and a devout Catholic, began typing up these stories and posting them on his website, which he styled as a “virtual museum” of miraculous events. A section on the site invited visitors to “discover how many friends you have in heaven”, and to read stories of young saints.
Acutis hoped to one day join their ranks. He was convinced that he would die before he reached adulthood and told his mother, Antonia, that he would perish of “a broken vein in his brain”. He wanted to be buried in the town of Assisi, where his family had a summer home. In the meantime, he devoted his life to the church, which was a surprise to his largely secular parents. As a teenager, he taught catechism classes to young children, and offered them a step-by-step guide to becoming a saint. ““Always remember that you, too, can become a saint!” he would say. Every day, they were to go to mass, recite the Holy Rosary, read the scripture and confess their sins.
Describing what would-be saints needed to do in life, Acutis omitted mention of the significant tasks they would need to undertake in death. To be recognised as a saint, an individual must go through what is essentially a prolonged posthumous trial during which their physical and spiritual remains are assessed. The Vatican office responsible for this process is known as the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, and it has been in operation since 1588. The dicastery investigates whether the candidate was spiritually exemplary in life, and whether they have proven useful to the faithful in death. Crucially, and most controversially, every candidate must also have two scientifically inexplicable miracles posthumously attributed to them before they can be canonised. (God alone can perform miracles, according to the Catholic faith; saints merely intercede on behalf of believers.)
The church’s strict rules for miracles mean that many seemingly miraculous events fall short of the official requirements, leaving some saintly causes to linger for decades despite ample veneration from the faithful. “There’s been this longstanding tension between popular piety and clerical rulings,” the historian Candy Gunther Brown told me. The Vatican’s saint-making process is, “in part, an effort to have official control over popular piety”.
Acutis wrote extensively about his theological devotion, as if in anticipation of his own postmortem trial. He filmed a video of himself in which he proclaimed that he was “destined to die”. Then, on 1 October 2006, when he was 15, he fell ill with a fever and sore throat. A paediatrician was consulted and an antibiotic prescribed, but his symptoms worsened. On 6 October, he found blood in his urine; the next day he did not have the strength to get out of bed. His parents took him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with leukaemia and transferred to an intensive care ward. He told his mother he would not make it out of the hospital alive. Over the next few days, his condition continued to decline, and a priest was summoned to his bedside. On 11 October, he suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and fell into a coma. Hours later, doctors declared him brain dead. The next day, at 6.45am, his heart stopped beating. His body was transported back to his home in Milan, where loved ones gathered. He was buried in a family plot in Piedmont while a tomb in Assisi was readied.
Not long after, Acutis’s belongings were handed over to a historical committee from the local archdiocese that began looking into whether he could have in fact been a saint. They started collecting testimonies from neighbours, friends, teachers and priests. They pored over his internet history and extensive writings, looking for any signs of sin. In 2012, the Archdiocese of Milan opened an official process for his beatification and canonisation, called a “Cause”. The following year, the Vatican gave its first sign of approval of Acutis’s candidacy, issuing an order called a nihil obstat, or “nothing hinders”, which grants permission for the investigation of a saintly life to proceed. His official journey to sainthood had begun.
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The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints is located on the third floor of an imposing building on St Peter’s Square, immediately outside the Vatican’s circular colonnade, two doors down from a gift shop and two floors up from the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Most visitors arrive seeking to petition the dicastery’s five relators – priests appointed to oversee the canonisation process – to advance their chosen Cause. A table in the entryway is covered with brochures, prayer cards and flyers promoting the lives of aspiring saints. On my visit earlier this year, I picked up a bookmark advertising the Cause of a 20th-century Brazilian nun, and prayer cards for a 17th-century Italian priest, an 18th-century Malagan mystic and the late Pope Benedict XVI.
The dicastery’s daily operations are kept out of the public eye. Father Angelo Romano, the newly appointed general relator of the dicastery, would not allow me to take photographs inside or to record our conversation, and just as a prosecutor or judge cannot discuss the details of ongoing litigation, he could not speak to me about any saintly investigations in progress. “We are a very peculiar court,” he said. “There is no point when a Cause will be dismissed, and there is no statute of limitations.” Romano estimates that the office is now working on no fewer than 1,600 Causes, some of which date back to the 15th century.
Who gets to be a saint is not just about holiness; it is about identity, politics, economics and geography. The historian Peter Burke regards saints as “cultural indicators, a sort of historical litmus paper sensitive to conditions between religion and society”. Canonisation has long been a way for the Catholic church to shape its image, and the Vatican has an incentive to approve candidates with useful profiles. In Acutis, the Holy See found an avenue to connect with a younger generation. From the moment his Cause was officially opened, Acutis was referred to as potentially “the first millennial saint”. He has been nicknamed “God’s influencer” and “the patron saint of the internet”.
Few Causes have proceeded as quickly as his. Today, a small but active community of Black Catholics is petitioning the Vatican for the accelerated canonisation of six Black American candidates for sainthood, the oldest of whom, Pierre Toussaint, has been dead for 171 years. In 2012, the first Native American saint, Kateri Tekakwitha, was approved for canonisation, 332 years after her death. Until 1983, when Pope John Paul II attempted to modernise the process, a Cause could not even be opened until the candidate had been dead for 50 years. (He reduced the waiting period to five years, halved the number of miracles required, and did away with the office of the “devil’s advocate”, established in 1587, whose role was to raise objections to every case.)
Running a Cause is not unlike organising a political campaign. Supporters of a would-be saint, who often form a “guild” or “association”, must publicise the candidate’s story and virtues. In Rome, a postulator, who acts as the equivalent of a campaign manager, must submit their credentials to the dicastery for approval. Their role is to usher the case through the dicastery’s bureaucracy, to keep track of costs and to collect accounts of potential miracles. For Acutis’s cause, a veteran postulator named Nicola Gori was appointed. In his book about Acutis’s life, Gori argues that his story offers “a way to avoid the deadening of conscience that is so typical of our modern age”.
Sainthood doesn’t come cheap. Supporters of each Cause must cover the cost of investigating and documenting their candidate’s life, which usually involves hiring historical, medical and theological experts. They also need to do publicity. Father Maurice J Nutt, a redemptorist priest in the US, estimated that he would have to raise $1m to see through the Cause of Sister Thea Bowman, an African American nun who died in 1990. “You have to pay for everything – the chairs in St Peter’s Square, the mass, the cardinals who have to be flown in,” he told me. Nutt knew Bowman personally. “She was encouraging us to share our gifts and to be very proud of who we are as Black Catholics,” he said. “She used to say, a saint is just a sinner who fell down but who got up again.”
Because the two miracles required for canonisation are so difficult to come by, supporters of a Cause tend to optimise for scale: the more people who pray to their candidate, the more likely it becomes that a miracle may actually occur. Camille Brown Privette, president of the guild for the Venerable Mother Mary Lange, a Haitian nun and educator who founded the first Catholic school for children of colour in Baltimore in 1818, hands out prayer flyers for Lange on aeroplanes and slips them into greetings cards. “My job is to get those two miracles,” she told me.
The path to sainthood was not always so elaborate. Before the 12th century, saints were recognised by popular acclamation, creating what scholars have called an “unregulated saints market”. Popes only began exerting authority over the process when the market got out of hand. In 1170, after a Swedish bishop tried to canonise a monk killed in a drunken brawl, Pope Alexander III decreed that all would-be saints had to be approved by the Vatican. In the 17th century, the papacy assumed total authority over the process. In recent years, the Causes of Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II have been expedited by papal decree, while others, like that of Pope Pius IX, have languished for centuries, largely forgotten by the faithful. (Would-be saints can only work miracles if the living remember to ask.)
Today, the rules governing sainthood retain the basic structure established four centuries ago. After the Vatican issues the nihil obstat order, testimonies about the candidate’s life must be submitted and then compiled into a positio. These volumes, which read a bit like legal briefs, often run to more than 1,500 pages. Each positio begins with a letter from the general relator of the dicastery, endorsing the Cause and explaining why a given case should advance. Accounts of alleged miracles are reproduced in full: the positio for Kateri Tekakwitha describes how a boy “suffering from a wasting away of the bones of one foot” was carried to her shrine and “restored to complete health”, and of how another child, who could not keep food or drink down, was cured after swallowing water soaked with earth from her grave and ashes from her clothing.
Next, the positio is presented to the plenum of the dicastery, a body of bishops and cardinals that serves as the office’s “highest court” and interrogates the written account for any signs of the unholy, which can stall a Cause for decades. (The Cause of Henriette DeLille, the founder of a New Orleans religious order, has been called into question because of a rumour that she gave birth to two sons out of wedlock.) If the plenum is convinced, then the case is brought before the pope, who determines whether the candidate can be called “venerable” and become the object of direct prayers from the faithful. After that, two miracles still need to be investigated, and found to be scientifically inexplicable. Proof of a first miracle means that an individual can be beatified, meaning that the Church recognises their place in heaven; only a second can make them a saint, venerated by the universal Catholic church.
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After the pope declared Carlo Acutis “venerable” in 2018, the search for miracles could begin. For the faithful, the question is not whether an aspiring saint will work miracles, but when. Rumoured signs of Acutis’s sainthood soon emerged. A group of Brazilian priests who visited his grave claimed that the rose petals they found there never wilted. When his body was exhumed in 2019, a rumour emerged that he had been found incorrupt. “He was still our big boy, 1.82 metres tall, only his skin was a little darker, with all his black, curly hair,” his mother told an Italian newspaper. (The Archbishop of Assisi issued a statement dispelling the rumours: “It is not true that the body was found incorrupt,” he said. “It was found in the normal state of transformation proper to a cadaveric condition.” In any case, the church no longer considers incorrupt remains to be an indication of sainthood.)
In April 2019, Acutis was moved to a glass-panelled tomb inside the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the major sanctuaries in Assisi, and a livestream of the shrine was set up. His body became church property and his remains were prepared for public display. A silicone mask of his face was made to cover up signs of decay, while his heart was preserved in a golden reliquary and deposited at the nearby Cathedral of San Rufino. Pieces of his funeral shroud, cuttings of his hair and fragments of his organs were collected and prepared as relics for veneration. (A “first class” relic is a part of the saint’s body; a “second class” one is something he owned; a “third class” one is something that he touched.) Acutis was attired in his favourite clothing: navy blue Nikes, blue jeans and a North Sails zip-up sweater. He was the first prospective saint to be buried in branded clothing.
Antonia has claimed that her son worked his first miracles on the day of his funeral mass, when he cured a woman of breast cancer. Gone are the days when saints would work miracles by taking flight, or saving the faithful from fires and floods. Since 1950, every miracle approved by the dicastery’s medical board – a secretive body of doctors who meet regularly to evaluate stories of divine healings – has been a physical act of healing. Even these kinds of miracles “are becoming more rare”, Pope John Paul II acknowledged in a 1988 address. The advance of scientific knowledge means that fewer cures are truly inexplicable. “It is becoming increasingly difficult to ascertain exactly what is a fact which goes beyond the laws of nature,” a dicastery staffer confessed to the journalist Kenneth Woodward, who spent several years studying the operations of the dicastery in the 1980s.
Those alleged miracles that do make it to the dicastery’s medical board must be accompanied by documentation: CT scans, X-rays, bloodwork reports. This requirement puts Causes from impoverished communities at a significant disadvantage, as the absence of medical equipment can shut down many miracle investigations before they even get started. And because the Vatican has proved willing to allow certain Causes to bypass the miracle requirement – in 1980, John Paul II beatified Tekakwitha in the absence of any substantiated miracle – many have begun to question whether it should continue to insist upon collecting records of them at all.
“The way miracles are seen has obviously changed as the world has changed,” Father Angelo Romano told me in Rome. The medical board will only recognise a miracle if, after thorough investigation, no existing scientific explanation can be found for a cure. “The question is: what is today the state of the art of medicine? We have to judge from the present moment of knowledge,” Romano said. “We cannot judge based on what you might discover tomorrow.”
As the haematologist and historian Jacalyn Duffin has noted, this approach is antithetical to that of scientists and doctors, who are taught to believe that the inexplicable phenomena of today are merely the discoveries of tomorrow. “Most doctors behave as if an explanation can be found,” Duffin told me. “That is a belief system. It is in direct parallel to the belief system that there can be supernatural divine intervention: they are both beliefs on the basis of no evidence.”
Duffin began studying medical miracles in 1989, after she was asked to look at bone marrow samples from a woman who had experienced an unlikely recovery from acute leukaemia. At first, she was asked to read the patient chart without knowing the context. The patient had submitted to aggressive chemotherapy, but she had also prayed to an 18th-century Canadian nun for healing: it was to the nun, not the chemotherapy, that she attributed her eventual cure. The experience pushed Duffin to undertake what remains the most comprehensive study of the Vatican’s archive of medical miracles.
“The truth is that sometimes things happen that have no scientific explanation. If I can’t explain it, who am I to tell the patient, who believes that she can explain it, that she is wrong?” Duffin said. “Why can’t we have miracles and not believe in God? Wonderful things happen that cannot be explained.”
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In 2019, the dicastery received a package from Brazil containing materials that claimed to document a miracle attributed to Acutis. The healing was said to have occurred on the seventh anniversary of his death, in 2013, when a three-year-old boy named Matheus kissed a relic of Acutis’s clothing that had been transferred to a chapel in Campo Grande, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul. (The circulation and transfer of relics, known as translation, is a strictly controlled process. Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo, the vice rector of the Cathedral of San Rufino in Assisi, who is in charge of international affairs for the town, told me that there are several hundred relics of Acutis’s hair.)
Matheus had been suffering from a diseased pancreas: he vomited continually and could only subsist on a liquid diet; no one expected him to live very long. At the chapel, he prayed to Acutis to be cured. Hours later, he ate a full meal of rice, beans and steak and kept all of it down. His doctors could not explain the sudden turn, nor understand why scans showed that his pancreas appeared to have healed itself. Neither could the medical board of the dicastery, which, after requesting additional documentation from Matheus’s family and physicians, voted in 2020 that there was no discernible scientific reason for the young boy’s recovery. Matheus’s recovery became Acutis’s first verified miracle, clearing the way for his beatification. In October 2020, 3,000 people attended the mass in Assisi where he was officially declared “blessed”, moving one step closer to sainthood.
Acutis’s Cause has proceeded so swiftly because of the groundswell of interest in his life. His age, nationality and interest in technology all made him an appealing candidate for hundreds of thousands of the faithful who recognised something of themselves in his story. Saints often act as mirrors of their time. The 18th-century nun, whose Cause Duffin had been asked to consult for, was an abused wife before she founded a religious order: “She had been married and had children; she was a saint for the 90s,” Duffin said. “Domestic abuse was a big issue at the time.”
Canonisations can be delayed for decades until the Vatican deems it to be an expedient moment, such as when the pope is visiting a saint’s home country. The Cause of the African American activist Sister Thea Bowman, for example, was officially opened in 2018, in the aftermath of the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the previous year. The entire process is “a reflection of how the Vatican has worked to consolidate power over lay devotional practices”, the historian Alexia Williams told me. Yet despite the church’s efforts to control what counts as a miracle and who gets to be a saint, pockets of popular veneration persist – a nod to the era when saints were recognised not by priests but rather by parishioners.
In 2023, Williams visited a rural monastery in Gower, Missouri, where hundreds of pilgrims had travelled to venerate the body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, an African American nun who died in 2019. When the sisters of her order exhumed her coffin to prepare it for transfer to their church, they found that her corpse had decayed less than expected. “Everyone talked about how miraculous it was,” Williams said. “People said her body smelled like roses.” She watched as pilgrims kissed Lancaster’s face and held her hand, pressing rosaries to her skin to turn them into third-class relics. The diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph sent a team of medical experts – three doctors and a county coroner – to examine her body, and they concluded that its condition was “highly atypical”. Yet while the nuns of Gower encouraged visitors to come and pray before her body, the Kansas City diocese discouraged people from doing so. Bishop James V Johnston Jr issued a statement warning that “visitors should not touch or venerate her body, or treat them as relics” and said there were no plans to initiate a Cause for Sister Wilhelmina. To her followers, however, Wilhelmina was “holy enough” to be a saint, Williams said, even if the church did not officially recognise her as such.
While the Vatican deploys a narrow definition of miracles, a far more capacious understanding of the miraculous exists among the faithful. Williams spoke to a woman in Denver who prayed to an aspiring saint for the return of a lost handbag, only to have someone call her a few hours later saying they had found it. What some people may regard as everyday miracles – the birth of a child, rain after a long drought, or a simple act of kindness – would never pass muster for the dicastery, to say nothing of all the alleged acts of miraculous healing that the medical board has also rejected. “The focus has been more on proof, rather than on the fact that people who were suffering were receiving healing,” Candy Gunther Brown, the historian, told me.
To truly believe in miracles is to require no proof of their occurrence, and to know that one may transpire at any moment. Multiple people I spoke with quoted the mid-century theologian Karl Rahner, who once said, “I don’t believe in miracles, I rely on them.” Candy Gunther Brown’s husband, Joshua Brown, is a neuroscientist at Indiana University who was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour more than 20 years ago. Doctors told him that people with his condition usually did not survive more than a few years, and that even doing a biopsy could kill him. “At that point, I figured I could either get ready to die or I could try to find a miracle,” Joshua Brown told me.
The Browns travelled around the country visiting churches where miracles were said to have occurred, praying for one to cure his condition. After nine months, MRIs showed that the tumour was still present, but had stopped growing. Brown kept having regular scans for seven years, and never had chemotherapy or radiation for the condition. “I’ve been totally fine,” he said. The experience led him to develop a “side-interest in miracles”, and today he runs the Global Medical Research Institute, which collects and evaluates medical evidence of allegedly miraculous cures around the world. Candy Gunther Brown, who is on the board of GMRI, told me that they are interested in “therapeutic pluralism”. She compared seeking spiritual aid in healing to pursuing other holistic measures, such as practising reiki, or even doing yoga, when all other options have failed.
Craig Rubens, an infectious disease specialist in Seattle who provided testimony about the extraordinary recovery of a young boy from a flesh-eating bacterial infection in 2006, is not a believer. Not long after the boy was discharged, three priests and a lawyer from his archdiocese came to interview Rubens and one of his colleagues. “I remember one of them asking me if I thought this was a miracle. I told them I did not have a sufficient understanding of what miracles really are to answer that question, but that I could, from a medical perspective, say that not everyone who gets an infection like this survives,” Rubens recalled. In his view, it was not God but rather a cascade of medical interventions – a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, repeated surgeries, experimental interventions, mechanical ventilation, artificially induced paralysis, medication – that saved his patient’s life, but he was willing to grant that the theological explanation gave the family a distinct kind of solace. In his decades of practice, Rubens has seen that a person’s will to survive can be what makes the difference that allows them to pull through: if the belief that a divine cure may be coming is what does it, then he does not see any reason to dispel that article of faith.
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In May 2024, the medical board of the dicastery announced that it had verified a second miracle attributed to Acutis. The healing occurred two years earlier, after a woman named Liliana, from Costa Rica, visited Acutis’s tomb in Assisi. Liliana’s daughter, Valeria, had fallen off her bike while she was studying at a university in Florence, and had been hospitalised with severe head trauma. According to the Vatican, Valeria “required craniotomy surgery and the removal of the right occipital bone to reduce pressure on her brain”. Doctors gave her a low chance of survival. At Acutis’s tomb, Liliana asked him to heal her daughter. That same day, Valeria’s doctors reported that she had begun breathing on her own again; a few days later, all signs of the haemorrhage had gone. Upon reviewing the incident, the medical board of the dicastery could find no scientific explanation for what had occurred. Pope Francis declared it a miracle and said that he would convene a meeting called a consistory of cardinals to formally approve Acutis’s canonisation.
After the news broke, a rush of visitors descended upon Acutis’s tomb in Assisi. Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo, in Assisi, told me that the response was “overwhelming”. In a single month, 32,000 people visited the ancient chapel where he lies entombed. On the day I visited, people posed for photographs outside with a cardboard cutout of his likeness. Inside, they knelt before his coffin, they pressed their hands up to the glass, they closed their eyes and moved their lips in prayer. One young woman sat silently crying before him; others lit candles as offerings. A volunteer kept the crowd in gentle order, ushering people out when it was time to make room for others. As I exited, a large group of Polish nuns made their way inside.
On 1 July, the Catholic cardinals in Rome gathered with Pope Francis in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. After the prefect of the dicastery, Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, presented the summary report on Acutis’s Cause – known as a peroratio, or a final plea – a vote was taken and the canonisation was approved.
Next year, at 10.30am on 27 April, the pope will confirm Acutis’s saintliness by uttering one Latin word: “discernimus”, or “we recognise it”. His name will be inscribed upon the List of Saints, a print volume published by the Dicastery and reissued every year. Carlo’s feast day will become part of the liturgical calendar, and his memory venerated by Catholics the world over.
This autumn, a fragment of Acutis’s pericardium, the sack that encircles the heart, toured North America. On the day the relic visited his church, Father Peter Turrone, a neuroscientist turned priest from the Archdiocese of Toronto, told me that he stood blessing people from 1.30pm to 9.45pm. One couple brought their young daughter, who had severe epilepsy and was in a wheelchair. She had already begun praying to Acutis and said her symptoms had diminished. At the church, Turrone touched the relic to her face and held it there as her parents cried before him, praying to Acutis for full healing. Now that he is set to become a saint, there will be no further medical investigations into Acutis’s divine works. All that is certain is that a prayer was uttered, a relic touched, some slight relief from pain felt. Every miracle is an “invitation to believe”, Turrone said. “It’s not the pope and it’s not the bishop who makes the Cause – it’s the people.”
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