St. Carlo Acutis, fifteen, puts together a Vatican academy's website

MILAN, Italy, summer 2006 AD — Saint Carlo Acutis spent the whole summer of 2006 AD designing a website. He was fifteen then, a schoolboy in Milan, in Italy.

St. Carlo had just finished his first year at the Istituto Leone XIII, a high school run by Jesuit priests. The students there did volunteer work with people in Milan who had no home or no job. The website was for that volunteer work, and it wasn’t the only one he was working on that summer.

He loved computers, and he had taught himself to write programs. The Archdiocese of Milan says he had a real gift for it. It says he understood things about computers that people normally learn only by studying them at university. Pope Leo XIV declared him a saint nineteen years after that summer, on September 7, 2025 AD.

At eleven St. Carlo began looking up the miracles of the Eucharist that have happened around the world through history. He built a website that listed them. He also put together an exhibition on about 136 of the main miracles. It had photographs and a written history of each one. He used it when he taught the faith to children at his parish.

Cardinal Agostino Vallini led the Mass at Assisi in 2020 AD at which St. Carlo was declared Blessed. In his sermon there, Cardinal Vallini said St. Carlo thought of the internet as a gift from God. He said St. Carlo saw it as an important tool for meeting people and spreading Christian values.

St. Carlo also edited films. He made small magazines too, getting the writing ready and arranging the pages. His mother, Antonia Salzano, says his friends loved him because he was always joking and making films. St. Carlo was always the centre of attention among his friends. One reason was that he helped them with their computers and programs. He did the same for classmates, relatives and anyone else who needed it.

Away from the computer he played football and loved basketball. He had a collection of video-game consoles, and he couldn’t say no to Nutella or ice cream. When he walked the dogs, he picked up any litter he came across. He went to Mass every day.

St. Carlo started at the Istituto Leone XIII at fourteen. That year he began working on the website of Santa Maria Segreta, his parish in Milan. He worked on it with a university student who was studying computer engineering.

At school St. Carlo made a presentation with a computer program. It showed the kinds of volunteer work students could choose, so that more of them would get interested. For a national contest, he encouraged many classes to make short adverts about volunteer work. He also organised the work on the adverts.

The school remembers him as un genietto dell’informatica (a little computer genius). He made videos to promote the volunteer work. The school says he knew how to pick the best camera shot, the story’s pace and the right music.

The other website

While St. Carlo built the school’s site that summer, he was also putting together the website of an academy. The academy’s work is to encourage people to honour the martyrs and to study their history. It is called the Pontifical Academy Cultorum Martyrum (of those who honour the martyrs). Its historic home is at the Vatican.

St. Carlo fell ill on October 2, early in the new school year. He died of leukaemia ten days later, on October 12, 2006 AD. The exhibition of Eucharistic miracles he put together has since been shown in more than 10,000 parishes around the world.