Canonised at 15: How a Millennial Coder Just Became the Vatican’s First Gen-Z Saint and What It Means for the World

In Naples, the line for confession now snakes past a hologram of a 15-year-old in sneakers, while in Manila his pixelated face beams from LED billboards above traffic that hasn’t moved since the last papal conclave. Carlo Acutis—nerd, gamer, and freshly minted “millennial saint”—has achieved the kind of omnipresence that Silicon Valley can only envy and that TikTok influencers monetise with vitamin gummies. On 12 October 2024, the boy who built HTML catalogues of Eucharistic miracles from his bedroom in Milan became the first millennial to be canonised, thereby solving the Church’s most vexing demographic headache: how to make heaven look less like a Renaissance painting and more like a Discord server.

The implications ricochet well beyond Vatican souvenir shops. In Brazil, favela parishes now run coding workshops under the banner “Santo Coder”; in Seoul, Catholic youth groups swap crypto donations for NFTs of Carlo’s favourite Eucharistic miracle (Spoleto, 1273, 3-D rendered). Even the Russian Orthodox, never ones to miss an ecclesiastical arms race, have hinted at a “Crypto-Basil the Blessed.” The global takeaway: if organised religion wants to survive the attention economy, it needs better UX design and a mascot who died before he could vote but still managed to rack up 39,000 hours of screen time without a single NSFW pop-up.

Carlo’s story reads like a start-up pitch deck ghost-written by Augustine of Hippo. Born in London to wealthy Italian parents, he prayed before meals and asked for “poor people’s desserts”—a line so perfectly curated it could headline a TED Talk on performative humility. By 14 he had programmed an online database of miracles that, in a delicious irony, now crashes every time an American bishop tweets about it. He died of leukemia in 2006, leaving behind a floppy disk labelled “Jesus is my antivirus,” a phrase that has since been merchandised onto phone cases manufactured in Shenzhen sweatshops. Two verified miracles later—an inexplicable healing in Costa Rica and a Brazilian boy whose pancreas allegedly rebooted after touching Carlo’s T-shirt—the Congregation for Saints gave the ultimate green light: vox populi, vox Dei, vox SEO.

The geopolitical ripple effects are already visible. Italy’s hard-right government, never shy about co-opting sacred imagery, has floated a “Saint Carlo Digital Nomad Visa,” promising tax breaks for Catholic coders who relocate to Assisi with at least one miracle in beta. Meanwhile, the Philippines—where 86% of Gen Z say they “would swipe right on a saint”—has seen a 400% spike in enrolment at Jesuit-run computer-science programs. Even secular Europe, allergic to anything that smells like incense, has taken notice: the European Commission is studying whether sanctity can be classified as a non-fungible cultural asset, thereby qualifying for green-transition subsidies.

Naturally, the canonisation has triggered the usual theological food fights. Traditionalists grumble that sainthood used to require lions, not laptops. Progressives counter that martyrdom by PowerPoint is the most contemporary form of suffering imaginable. Atheist commentators, ever the life of the party, note that Carlo’s greatest miracle was persuading teenagers to attend catechism without a loot box. The consensus among Vatican-watchers is that Pope Francis has pulled off a masterstroke of brand repositioning: the Church now markets itself as open-source, decentralised, and compatible with both rosary and retina display.

So what does it mean for the rest of us, scrolling through apocalypse updates between coffee and existential dread? Perhaps that transcendence, like everything else, has been gamified. We used to earn grace by climbing mountains barefoot; now we level up by curating miracle databases in between Fortnite sessions. Carlo Acutis—patron saint of Wi-Fi passwords and unanswered DMs—offers a sliver of hope that holiness can be uploaded, downloaded, and maybe even streamed on low bandwidth. The joke, of course, is that the servers hosting his legacy are still powered by fossil fuels and maintained by underpaid contractors who have never heard of him. But in a world where doomscrolling passes for contemplation, perhaps that’s the most honest miracle of all: finding eternity in a loading bar that actually reaches 100%.