St. Carlo Acutis dies at fifteen, his organs too damaged to give

MONZA, Italy, October 12, 2006 AD — Saint Carlo Acutis, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy from Milan, died at San Gerardo Hospital in Monza at 6:45 this morning, Thursday, October 12, 2006 AD. He had fallen ill ten days earlier with what was first taken for a bad flu, and doctors had declared him brain-dead the evening before.

St. Carlo had spent the summer designing websites, among them a new one for the volunteer service of the Istituto Leone XIII, the Jesuit high school in Milan where he had just completed his first year. From his First Communion on he went to Mass every day, and he spent long periods praying before the Tabernacle.

St. Carlo first felt unwell on Monday, October 2, at the start of the school year. He did not get better, and on Sunday, October 8, he grew suddenly much worse. That day his parents, Andrea Acutis and Antonia Salzano, took him to the De Marchi clinic in Milan. As he went into the building, St. Carlo said: “I’m not getting out of here.”

Doctors there diagnosed fulminant M3 leukaemia, a form of acute myeloid leukaemia and the most aggressive type of the disease. The next day he was moved to San Gerardo Hospital in Monza, which had a centre specialising in that type of leukaemia.

St. Carlo said more than once during the illness: “I want to offer my suffering to the Lord for the Pope and for the Church. I don’t want to go to Purgatory; I want to go straight to heaven.” Some of the nurses and doctors caring for him were moved by the way he accepted the illness and the pain. He kept his calm and his good humour even at the worst moments.

On Tuesday, October 10, St. Carlo was certain that he would die soon, and he asked to receive the Anointing of the Sick and Holy Communion. A priest at the hospital anointed him.

On Wednesday, October 11, bleeding in his brain, brought on by the leukaemia, put him into a coma.

At 5:00 that evening doctors declared him clinically dead: all activity in his brain had stopped, but his heart was still beating. His family wanted to give his organs to a young man who was waiting for a transplant, but they could not, because the leukaemia had damaged the organs too badly for them to be used. St. Carlo’s heart went on beating through the night. It stopped at 6:45 on Thursday morning.

The news reached his classmates, and everyone who had known him, at once. His body was laid out at the family home, and people came in a steady stream to say goodbye. His funeral was celebrated two days later, on Saturday, October 14, in his parish church, Santa Maria Segreta in Milan.

Pope Leo XIV canonised him in St. Peter’s Square on September 7, 2025 AD. Five years earlier, Pope Francis had declared him Blessed in an Apostolic Letter dated October 10, 2020 AD. That letter set October 12 as the day on which his feast may be kept every year, qua in caelum ortus est (the day on which he was born into heaven).