In the Italian town of Assisi, an ancient cathedral marks the place where St. Francis abandoned his noble raiments for the simple habit of a poor monk. Inside, not far from the relics of saints and former popes, you can behold the mummified body of a 15-year-old web designer named Carlo Acutis.
Acutis’ life, by all accounts, was not particularly remarkable — though it was certainly marked by a strong sense of Catholic piety. Born in London in 01991 to wealthy parents, he moved to Milan, where, from the age of three, he would ask to visit churches. He donated his pocket money to any poor that he met; at school, The Guardian reported, he would offer support to “classmates whose parents were going through divorces.” On account of his eagerness for the Eucharist, he was offered first communion early, at just seven years old. “To always be united to Jesus, this is my program of life,” he wrote at the time.
Acutis passed the time putting his web development skills to use for the local diocese. In addition to making church websites, he maintained a database of approved eucharistic miracles — often grisly stories of bleeding altars and bits of bread, the showstopper setpieces of transubstantiation. He maintained one, too, for miraculous appearances of the Virgin Mary, more than 100 in all, faithfully conveying the lady’s (Vatican-approved) messages of apocalyptic woe.
In 02006, however, his story was tragically cut short. Checking into the hospital with what his parents thought was a mild flu, his condition deteriorated dramatically. Eight days later, he requested the last rites, certain he would die. In the end, his own blood had betrayed him. After falling into a deep coma, on October 11, at 5 p.m., he was declared dead from a rare, rapid, and lethal form of leukemia.
Almost immediately, a campaign was launched to make Acutis the Catholic Church’s newest saint. Acutis’ life, his acts, even his devotion to the church, may not have been particularly profound when set against the miraculous accomplishments of other saints. But in him many Catholics saw a certain relatability — especially among a key demographic. “Carlo is a boy of our time — a boy of the internet age,” Bishop Domenico Sorrentino of Assisi said at the unveiling of his tomb. Here was a saint for a new generation, his earthly body displayed on digital live-streams in a gilet, jeans and Nike kicks.
The year after his death, the Italian journalist Nicola Gori wrote a biography, The Eucharist: My Road to Heaven, making the case for his canonization. The Catholic Church has a rule that no person may be beatified — a prerequisite step for sainthood — less than five years after their death; in 02012, barely a year after that deadline expired, an official campaign was launched. Funds poured in for websites, a traveling exhibition, and prayer cards in churches across Italy and around the world. Fast-tracked through the Vatican, less than 12 months later, the Holy See granted his candidacy for sainthood. Acutis was approved for canonization in July 02024. He’s expected to be the centerpiece of Pope Francis’ next grand canonization ceremony in Rome in October 02024 — a clear example of what Francis once called the “saint next door,” the “middle class of holiness.”
Whatever Acutis’ merits, his pathway to the upper ranks of heaven is a particularly stark example of the modern character of sainthood. The “strategic canonization” of “celebrity saints,” in the words of cultural historian Oliver Bennett, has been on the rise since Pope John Paul II reformed the rules for canonization in 01983 and invented the modern “saint factory.” Gone are the lengthy waiting periods and requirement that numerous miracles be attributed to the saint’s intercession. Gone, too, is the internal culture of skepticism and critique: the Devil’s Advocate, a real position charged with arguing against the merits of saints, was largely abolished. As a result, the historian Valentina Ciciliot writes, “the saint becomes a consumer good, increasingly taking on the features of worldly celebrities.” Today, the making of a new saint more closely resembles a political campaign — with all the attendant costs — than it does anything particularly sacred.
And yet, it would seem there is some growing discomfort within the halls of the Holy See about the modern nature of sanctity. At the same time as Acutis was racing towards sainthood, the Vatican was issuing new guidelines on the recognition of certain miracles, clamping down on the proliferation of new visionaries, miracle workers and pilgrimage sites in the age of social media. The new rules centralize the verification of supernatural occurrences in the office of the papacy with a vigor not seen since the 17th century. The effect, the religious historian Philip Almond writes, is to a kind of spiritual retreat — a further “disenchantment” of the world, already made mundane by the relentless march of secularism. “Overall, God will be shown to be minimally directly intervening,” Almond wrote for The Conversation. “A clear declaration of a supernatural event having taken place will virtually never happen” again.
But if we are indeed living in an age of “everyday saints” like Acutis, why is the Vatican so loath to place its seal on these supposed examples of the supernatural? The Catholic public has not lost its appetite for miraculous occurrences and divine manifestations — if anything, it seems to be growing. Hardly a year passes without new accounts of Marian messages, suffering saints, weeping statues, or prophetic encounters that can attract hundreds of adherents.
The reality is, for some time now, the Catholic Church has been undergoing a long, slow shift, playing out on the timescale of centuries: a shift to distance itself from the popular enthusiasms of its most devout parishioners. In fact, the Church’s very conception of the sacred is changing — and with it, perhaps, a whole lot more about the Catholic faith.
In the early days of Christendom, the holy man was hardly an “everyday” figure. The saint of Late Antiquity depended not on benevolence or familiarity for his holiness, but on a strange and radical otherness.
The quintessential holy man, the historian Peter Brown once wrote, was a man of the mountains or desert; a man removed from — indeed, immune to — the ills of settled society. St. Simeon Stylites, a quintessential early saint who set himself apart by festering for 37 years on top of a pillar, was originally a shepherd, “stalking [his] God,” Brown writes, in the “high places of sacrifice.” Marginal places like these were ideal theaters for holiness. Sanctity could be made manifest solely by surviving their hardships, or by wandering into their small settlements and performing works of wonder. Acts of magic — including extreme endurance like that of St. Simeon — were the true mark of sainthood, proof of inhuman abilities that stemmed from their closeness to God.
Figures like Simeon could draw crowds of hundreds to follow them on their wanderings, even if their unusual magnetism could also inspire hostility and suspicion alike from the masses. Almost by necessity, they were, at first, threatening figures — apparitions from beyond the pale; magicians, maybe, or demons masked as holy men. Their apocalyptic wisdom and stark morality flowed forth unprompted, threatening to exorcize the hidden evils of the community.
But paradoxically, saints like these could quickly become power players in the ancient world — their strangeness and scorn for worldly affairs made them valuable arbiters as decaying empires gave way to bitter factionalism. “Perched on his column, nearer to the demons of the upper air than to human beings, [Simeon] was objectivity personified,” Brown writes. A saint like Simeon could easily stand in for the divine justice of a distant God. Emperors, kings, and commoners alike would seek the counsel of such saints, even (or especially) when they sought to withdraw from society entirely. “The lonely cells of the recluses of Egypt have been revealed, by the archaeologist, to have been well-furnished consulting rooms,” Brown writes.
At the outset, the Christian world was too diffuse to support any kind of coherent theology of who should be eligible for such exalted status. A holy man need not even live a particularly virtuous life if his miracles had won acclaim from the masses. The 6th-century St. Sigismund, the first king to be canonized, had his own son drowned and defended incest rife at his court. The principle of vox populi, vox Dei — the voice of the people is the voice of God — reigned supreme. It was only in 00401, at the Council of Carthage, that bishops were assigned the job of recognizing true saints — though it was largely aimed at stemming the tide of heretical cults, not denying the validity of popular saints.
It was inevitable, the medievalist André Vauchez writes, that the “anarchic proliferation of cults would, in the long run, cause problems.” And indeed, by the 12th century, the papacy finally seemed to feel so, as it increasingly fought to assert its version of the faith over the multitudinous expressions found in newly Christianized areas. Pope Alexander III became the first to assert that the recognition of saints was the exclusive right of the Roman pontiff when he rejected the cult of a murdered Swedish monarch, St. Erik. “Even if prodigies and miracles were produced through his intermediary, you would not be permitted to venerate him publicly as a saint without the authorization of the Roman Church,” he wrote to his successor (and, ironically, murderer) in 01171.
It was in this era — one of political consolidation for the papacy — that the rules governing the recognition of sainthood were first developed in Italy’s papal states, then exported across Europe. These new rules also marked a subtle shift in thinking about sanctity and holiness. The “prodigies and miracles” that defined the earlier generations of the saints were no longer the sole marker of sanctity, nor the most reliable. Under Innocent III, pope from 01198 to 01216, the Church’s inquests into the causes of saints began to de-emphasize the value of wonder-working in favor of examples of everyday faith and good works. The era of the saint-as-magician was ending; that of the saint-next-door had just begun.
Reflecting the Church’s increasingly legal mood, the process for canonization also evolved, by the 16th century, into the form of a judicial trial, allowing for close examination of witness testimonies and miracles. The standard of evidence was not necessarily raised — but the papacy could now more easily find reasons to reject an undesirable claimant. Necessarily, campaigns to win the pope’s personal favor, now an essential for any candidate, became more costly and more involved. The prayer cards bearing Acutis’ tousle-haired image are the legacy of the innovations of this age: the 15th-century campaign for St. Catherine of Siena’s canonization involved the production of thousands of paper strips depicting scenes from the saint’s life, distributed across Italy for public and private veneration.
As the costs of sainthood ballooned, the recognition of new saints became more of a top-down affair. The wealthy elite of Europe used campaigns for canonization to advance their local rivalries or seize economic gains. Powerful monastic orders played the same game within the Vatican. But in the arms race for new canonizations, something else happened too: the number of miraculous deeds ascribed to saintly figures began to boom. The fame of these new saints grew in proportion to their supposed deeds, as did their popular acclaim. It was not long before the likes of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist were edged out of their prized places in the apses of grand cathedrals, replaced by the likes of St. Francis or St. Antony of Padua. The papacy had built itself a powerful new army in heaven. Whether it could control it was another question entirely.
Despite the efforts of the papacy to overrule local bishops and impose regularity on canonizations, it was never entirely successful at suppressing what it viewed as embarrassing forms of popular enthusiasm. St. Guinefort, a greyhound venerated as a martyr after it was wrongly blamed for the death of a child and drowned, drew condemnation from the Dominican Stephen of Bourbon in the 13th century. His shrine remained popular in rural France to the end of the 19th century, and websites still sing his praises today.
But in 15th century France, the church faced a more profound challenge in the cult of Joan of Arc, a visionary mystic claiming divine authority, rising on a wave of popular sentiment. For Vauchez, Joan is an example of “a sainthood lived and recognized by simple people.” But at the behest of the English court, the Church threw the full weight of its newly developed legal systems at her. Put on trial for heresy in 01431, she was interrogated ruthlessly, about her faith, her loyalty, and her virginity. “It was […] the first process undertaken by the ‘great minds’ from the universities,” Vauchez writes, “in order to prevent a popular cult from being born and developing.” And yet, just 21 years later, at the behest of France, it was applied again in the other direction. Joan was acquitted in 01456 and, amid a surge in French Catholic ultranationalism, finally canonized in 01920.
The story of Joan of Arc shows how fickle sainthood can be when it is no longer a reflection of a position above society, but popular acclaim from the powers within it. In the Congo, some Catholics have long desired the canonization of an 18th-century “black Jeanne d’Arc”, Kimpa Vita or Dona Beatriz. In many ways, Beatriz’s life has many parallels to Joan’s story; though born into nobility instead of the lower classes, she too professed to have been a medium for saints, embodying, in her case, the spirit of St. Antony. Instead of English peers and French bishops, she fought against Capuchin monks and Portuguese colonists to renew the Congo and the Catholic Church, remaining nonetheless faithful to the pope in Rome.
But Beatriz, like Joan, at times also challenged Catholic orthodoxy in radical ways. She was iconoclastic and opposed to rites like baptism, equating even crucifixes with unchristian fetish objects; she said that Congo was the holy land and the Virgin Mary a slave. Most scandalously, she mothered a secret child. The result, the historian Benjamin Hendrickx writes, was a highly syncretic Indigenous Catholicism — in other words, a truly local expression of the faith in a land colonized by Christ. Pope Paul VI had the opportunity to consider her cause for canonization in 01966. He rejected it outright.
More and more, as the Catholic Church has spread its wings around the globe, it has encountered difficult cases like these in the very marginal places from which ancient saints once sprung. This happens, not least, because Catholic evangelists have long encouraged them. During the colonization of Mexico, the theologian Hans-Jürgen Prien relates, missionaries drew explicit comparisons between Catholic saints and Indigenous gods; St. Simeon, for example, was equated with Huhueteotl, Xiuhtecuhtli, and Mam — fire deities from the Aztec and Mayan religions often depicted as an old man. The result, he says, is “a pantheon of saviors, Virgins, apostles, and saints”: the Lord of Earthquakes in Cuzco, the Lord of the Sea in Callao, or a black madonna ringed in candles — Our Lady of Candelaria — venerated in the Canary Islands, Guatemala, and Mexico.
As secularism advances in Europe and these corners of the faith become more integral to the Church’s survival, the Vatican has struggled to articulate a coherent view on whether these modes of worship should survive or be suppressed. In Brazil, a passionate cult of worship developed in the late 19th century around a saint known as Escrava Anastácia, a slave woman depicted in an iron mask with bright blue eyes. Her legend tells of her dying as a result of the great cruelty of her masters, nonetheless forgiving them on her deathbed. “Various marginal populations, from street children to gays, saw in her not only someone who understood suffering, but who was endowed with the power of an official saint, with none of an official saint’s off-putting formality and distance,” the anthropologist John Burdick writes in Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race and Popular Christianity in Brazil. In 01984, backed by financing from the state petroleum company, Brazilian Catholics mounted a campaign for Anastácia’s canonization. But within a few years, this too was rejected by the Vatican, which ruled that Anastácia, in all likelihood, had never existed.
This outcome was particularly ironic because of the litany of fictional saints that play a central role in Catholic piety. Of the fourteen “holy helpers”, saints whose intercession is believed to be especially effective, half are believed to be entirely invented. Among them are St. Catherine of Alexandria, from whose severed head milk supposedly flowed; Margaret the Virgin, who was swallowed by a dragon; and St. Christopher, who, due to mistranslation, was for centuries depicted with the head of a dog. The Catholic Church suppressed their cults and eliminated their feast days in a series of 01969 reforms; but such was their popularity that by the early 02000s, several had been reinstated. For the saints of the Church’s European canon, at least, fame is not only enough to win a seat in heaven; it can make a real place in history — or at least real enough to count.
Of course, popular enthusiasms like those for Anastácia and Beatriz don’t always take long-dead figures as their object. The Vatican’s new guidelines on the recognition of miracles are primarily aimed at reining in the celebration of contemporary seers, visionaries, and miracle workers, on which the Church has long struggled to articulate a coherent position.
Take, for example, the case of Audrey Santo, a non-responsive girl at the center of an active local cult in Worcester, Massachusetts, who died aged 23 in 02007. Left mute and paralyzed by a 01987 drowning incident, Santo purportedly bore the signs of stigmata, and communion wafers and holy icons would reportedly bleed oil in her presence. Her fame and popularity grew to such an extent that her body, “strapped to a stretcher behind a picture window in a small house in the middle of a football field”, once drew more than 8,000 pilgrims to Massachusetts’ College of the Holy Cross.
In all the time that Santo was purportedly performing her miracles, neither the local bishop nor the greater Catholic hierarchy took a clear position on her sanctity. Bishop Daniel P. Reilly of Worcester would say only that “the most striking evidence of the presence of God in the Santo home is seen in the dedication of the family to Audrey.” A second inquest into the events in her household has never been completed; her case for canonization, in the works since her death in 02007, also seems to have stalled.
Yet as strange as the devotion to Santo may seem, she is simply the latest in a long line of saints and mystics identified as “victim souls”, individuals whose grave suffering in this world mirrors the work of Christ and guarantees the forgiveness of sins for others in the next. The concept has never been formally approved by the Vatican, but it has long held a place in popular Catholic theology. Purported victim souls include respected figures like St. Therese of Lisieux and Anne Catherine Emmerich, a mystic whose time-traveling visions of Jesus identified the house of Mary in Ephesus and inspired scenes in The Passion of the Christ. But it also includes more problematic figures, like Anneliese Michel, a 25-year-old woman subjected to 67 exorcisms before she starved herself to death. Her priests were later convicted of negligent homicide.
With her inability to consent to her place as an object of devotion, Santo presented a particularly challenging public relations issue for the Catholic Church. “These are constituencies of Catholics that are very active and you don’t want to lose,” Matthew Schmalz, a professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross who studied the Santo phenomena, told me. But “others will say it’s horrible, seeing this woman in her bedroom, celebrating suffering […] There’s this idea that an unattractive image of Catholicism is being portrayed.”
But those saints that can still speak often pose greater challenges still. The Vatican’s new guidelines are also aimed at curbing the proliferation of Marian apparitions, supernatural encounters with the Virgin Mary that have surged in popularity since the mid-19th century. In the archetypical cases — Lourdes in 01858 and Fátima in 01917 — such occurrences often centered on individuals that, like the saints of old, came from the margins of society: the children of shepherds, millers, and farmers. And like those earlier saints, this new crop of visionaries seemed prepared to critique society and the Catholic hierarchy in ways more everyday holy figures could not.
One apparition at La Salette in France, which predated those of either Lourdes or Fátima, transmitted critiques of the abuses of farm workers and laborers; the Dutch historian Peter Jan Margry interprets them as a response to the rapid industrialization of the age. Another set of visitations to four schoolchildren in Garabandal, Spain, warned that “many cardinals, bishops and priests are following the road to perdition, and with them they are taking many more souls”; the warning was read by the historian W.A. Christian Jr. as a critique of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (01962-01965). Neither miracle was ever recognized by the Church; in fact, Ciciliot writes, since 01950, the Church has only definitively ruled on six such cases, “even though the phenomena often grew without clear guidance and with the involvement of people from many dioceses.”
That’s putting it lightly. Marian apparitions often spawn unrecognized pilgrimage sites that draw thousands of visitors a year, and have given rise to what Margry identifies as an informal network of Marian movements from New York to Japan — often on the basis of a “divergent” theology of redemption. “These […] devotions are by now one of the strongest structural elements in the modern religious field of influence surrounding the Roman Catholic Church,” Margry writes.
That the Church has recognized some of these visitations as miracles and not others, he says, has only encouraged the ultratraditionalist strains in many of these groups, which at their extremes can view the modern papacy as captured by demonic forces. It’s no wonder the Vatican is beginning to question whether the weird world of the miraculous is really on their side.
In past eras of the Church, the Vatican could at times react to heretical critique among the faithful with serious condemnation and the swift imposition of orthodoxy. We need not go back to the inquisitions of the 12th century or the trial of Joan of Arc, either; the Vatican rejected many supposed apparitions between 01950 and 01970, including popular cults like the one at Garabandal.
But since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, Margry writes, “these devotions are being handled in a much more ambivalent and restrained way.” As in other periods of retraction and reform, the Vatican appears willing to second-guess its past judgements, undercutting its own authority; devotions previously demonized or denied a seal of approval even see their way to canonization, as did Joan of Arc.
It is possible that the Vatican’s new regulations for the recognition of miracles are an effort to arrest this trend, and clamp down on the challenges to Church unity and hierarchy that have emerged in the era of a looser, more expansive dogma. “If you are a bishop, or if you’re a pope, what you do is you have to manage diversity within unity or unity within diversity,” Schmalz said. “The barbed wire fence is when local expressions of the supernatural challenge the church hierarchy in some sense.”
But the race to canonize more saints than in any other time in history seems to suggest that the Church has other motives at play. Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro, two Harvard economists, have tracked the way that the Vatican has, in recent years, found local heroes to celebrate in areas where competition with Protestant sects and charismatic movements is strongest. These figures need not even be made full saints, McCleary tells me: the prerequisite stage, beatification, limits veneration to the local diocese, making it a perfect means of sanctioning the worship of potentially controversial figures.
And yet, even beatified figures need at least one demonstrated miracle, even if the requirement seems now to be somewhat of an embarrassment for the modern church. For milquetoast figures like Acutis, this often takes the form of miraculous medical recoveries by persons praying to the would-be saint in far-flung lands; most will never ask why Brazilians or Costa Ricans, replete with “everyday saints” in their own backyards, would choose to direct their most desperate prayers to a little-known Italian teenager.
The cognitive dissonance of a Catholic Church, embarrassed by the miraculous but pumping out new saints at unprecedented speed, leaves many ordinary believers with a somewhat strained relationship to their faith. “Few — and certainly not devotees — can judge what is to be counted as part of the official domain of the Church and its piety, and what is not,” Margry writes.
But the fact is, the Holy See simply cannot survive in a world devoid of the miraculous. Like all religions, the Christian faith has been utterly dependent from its earliest days on what religious scholars often call “enchantment” — a philosophical worldview that allows for the possibility of something beyond the mundane and material. As historian Elizabeth Sutherland writes, holiness itself is “an irreducibly supernatural phenomenon [...]. Participating in the divine life entails a partial sharing in God’s ineffable nature.”
If the Catholic Church imagines a less ineffable world, it necessarily imagines a less holy one. And it’s not only the weird and radical forms of holiness that will be lost. William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist of religion, understood the role of saints as challenging society to better itself, tugging its conscience on the way to greater goodness. A “middle class” of holiness may simply produce a middle class of virtue. If the Church turns its back on its weird and radical roots, dismisses the many rebellions at its margins, or refuses to reckon with many of the most popular — and unorthodox — expressions of the faith, it’s not only the ancient idea of the holy man that will be lost. The saint next door may disappear too.
