VATICAN CITY: A teenager who died of leukaemia in 2006 became the first Catholic saint of the millennial generation on Sunday (Sep 7), in a Vatican ceremony led by Pope Leo and attended by an estimated 70,000 young worshippers from dozens of countries.
Carlo Acutis, a British-born Italian boy who died aged 15, learned computer code to build websites to spread his faith. His story has drawn wide attention from Catholic youth, and he is now at the same level as Mother Teresa and Francis of Assisi.
Leo, the first US pontiff, canonised Acutis on Sunday along with Pier Giorgio Frassati, a young Italian man who was known for helping those in need and died of polio in the 1920s.
In impromptu remarks to crowds in St Peter’s Square at the opening of the event, Leo said Acutis and Frassati were examples of holiness, and of helping those in need.
“All of you, all of us together, are called to be saints,” the pontiff told the young crowd, which had spilled out of the square down the main boulevard into the Vatican from Rome.
“Carlo … loved to say that heaven has always been waiting for us, and that to love tomorrow is to give the best of ourselves today,” Leo said in a later sermon.
The two new saints, said the pope, “are an invitation to all of us, especially young people, not to squander our lives, but to direct them upwards (to heaven)”.
