By Father Joseba Kamiruaga Mieza, CMF
The Catholic Church will canonise Blessed Carlo Acutis on September 7, Pope Leo XIV has announced. The ceremony will take place in St. Peter’s Square, and is expected to draw thousands of young people from all over the world. With this canonisation, the Church will formally recognise her first millennial saint—a teenager of the digital age whose profound love for the Eucharist continues to touch the hearts of many.
Born in 1991 and dying of leukemia at the age of 15 in 2006, Carlo lived a brief life filled with extraordinary simplicity, joy, and faith. He was known for using his computer skills to evangelise, especially by building a website that documented Eucharistic miracles from around the world. His favourite saying, “The Eucharist is my highway to Heaven,” has since inspired countless young Catholics.
Together with Carlo, Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, a young man known for his social outreach and deep spirituality, will also be canonised. These two figures—one from the early 20th century, the other from the 21st—stand as vibrant reminders that holiness is not a matter of age or era, but of fidelity to Christ and love of neighbour.
Carlo’s story has understandably ignited renewed interest in the Eucharist, especially among the young. Yet this moment also invites us to reflect more deeply on how we speak about Eucharistic devotion, and how we educate believers in the mystery of the Real Presence of Christ.
Saints are not canonised because all their devotional practices are universal or theologically complete, but because they lived lives of exceptional holiness in communion with the Church
Some voices have rightly distinguished between personal spiritual experience and doctrinal expression. A canonisation, after all, is not a declaration of theological completeness, but a recognition of a person’s heroic virtue and fidelity to the gospel.
Saints are not canonised because all their devotional practices are universal or theologically complete, but because they lived lives of exceptional holiness in communion with the Church.
It is worth recalling that even great theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church, did not foresee or affirm every doctrine later defined by the Magisterium, such as the Immaculate Conception, formally proclaimed in 1854. Holiness does not imply infallibility, and personal spirituality, however beautiful, is not necessarily normative.
The risk today is not Carlo’s example—it is the over-simplification of his example. To present his deep and sincere Eucharistic devotion as a doctrinal template for all may unintentionally narrow the Church’s rich and living understanding of the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is not a private relic or object of obsession; it is the living memorial of Christ’s Paschal Mystery, celebrated within the Church and inseparable from her mission of justice, mercy, and communion.
Let us not mistake emotional intensity for theological maturity. Let us not reduce the unfathomable mystery of the Eucharist to merely a catalogue of extraordinary phenomena. To do so risks distorting both the miracle and the Mystery.
Carlo’s story has understandably ignited renewed interest in the Eucharist, especially among the young. Yet this moment also invites us to reflect more deeply on how we speak about Eucharistic devotion, and how we educate believers in the mystery of the Real Presence of Christ
A saint, not a system
What the Church holds up in Blessed Carlo Acutis is not a model of doctrinal completeness, but a young man in love with Christ, devoted to prayer, committed to helping others, and inspired by the beauty of the Eucharist. His faith, nourished as it was within a culture often indifferent or hostile to religion, is a shining light for our times.
We are called to celebrate his canonisation not by replicating his devotional preferences, but by imitating his humility, his wonder, and his willingness to let Jesus shape his life. This is the Eucharistic witness the Church needs: not one of obsessive focus on externals, but one that radiates love, reverence, and transformation.
The true miracle of the Eucharist is not found in extraordinary signs—it is in the ordinary, daily conversion of hearts made possible through communion with Christ and the Church. That is what Carlo Acutis lived, and that is what every believer is invited to rediscover.
