Vatican to Name Carlo Acutis, Pier Giorgio Frassati Saints in 2025
Pope Francis announced this week that he would be elevating two Italian confessors into the highest honor possible for the Catholic Church.
Francis announced his intention to canonize Millennial computer programmer Carlo Acutis and 20th-century adventurer Pier Giorgio Frassati during the 2025 Jubilee Year at his weekly general audience at St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday (Nov. 20).
The Catholic News Agency reported that Acutis, who died in 2006 at the age of 15 due to leukemia, would undergo the process of canonization, which is the fourth step in the process of Catholic sainthood.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni later confirmed the dates of the canonizations of both young men, with Acutis to be canonized on April 27, 2025 and Frassati in late July or early August.
Il #Papa all’udienza generale annuncia che l’anno prossimo, nella Giornata dei bambini e degli adolescenti nell’ambito del #Giubileo, canonizzerà il beato Carlo Acutis. Nella giornata dei giovani, sempre nell’Anno Santo, canonizzerà il beato Pier Giorgio Frassati pic.twitter.com/JbE4I9sVeo
— Vatican News (@vaticannews_it) November 20, 2024
Acutis, the Millennial Geek
Acutis was born in London in 1991 from Italian parents. Early in his life, he was interested in video games, the Catholic faith, and how to evangelize it through the then-new technology called the internet.
In particular, Acutis documented Eucharistic miracles and approved apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a website, which Catholic pundits claim as third-class relics by technicality.
Francis beatified Acutis in 2020 and his relics were enshrined at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Assisi, Italy.
Upon canonization, Acutis would be designated as the patron saint of the Internet, the youth, and the Millennial generation.
As he is a confessor in the Catholic hagiography, Acutis’s intercession would need to intervene in two Vatican-approved miracles in order to become a saint, compared to only one required miracle for martyrs. It is understood that Francis recognized a second miracle through Acutis’s intercession in 2022 when a Costa Rican woman was allegedly healed of her brain hemorrhage after falling off her bike.
Frassati the Adventurer
Meanwhile, Frasatti is a Third Order Dominican who was equally passionate about sports, mountaineering, and Catholic social justice in a life that sought adventure and opposed the regime of Benito Mussolini.
Frassati died in 1925 aged 24, and his remains were interred at the Turin Cathedral in northwestern Italy. It is understood that his canonization would come near his 100th death anniversary, after almost a century of setbacks regarding his canonization process, particularly during the pontificate of Pius XII.
Frassati was beatified in 1990 by Pope John Paul II.
His younger sister, Luciana Frassati Gawronska, was also known as a writer and activist who opposed the Fascist regime in Italy and its Nazi counterpart in Poland. She died in 2007 at the age of 105.
Several organizations, places, and Catholic facilities have since been named after him, including the Frassati Building of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, which houses its senior high school program across the main campus along España Boulevard.
Whether Frassati’s living nephew, 88-year-old journalist, Italian senator, and former MEP Jas Gawronski, would attend the canonization rites remains to be seen.