Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic church has no rule on how long one must live to posthumously be deemed a saint.
While many are quick to assume that being granted sainthood is a thing of the past due to the lack of canonizations for people born within the past 100 years, the title of saint is not restricted to people from several generations ago.
Currently, the most recent birth date of a saint belongs to María de la Purísima Salvat Romero, who was born in 1926, passed in 1998, and was canonized in 2015.
However, she and the other 10,000+ saints will be joined by their youngest canonized human to date in the very near future.
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Carlo Acutis, a boy who was born in 1991 and passed in 2006 after a bout with leukemia at the age of 15, has recently been deemed qualified for canonization - and therefore sainthood - by the Catholic church, and could soon become the first-ever millennial saint.
London-born Acutis, who was a tutor, computer coder, and, above all, a devoted Catholic during his time on Earth, has garnered this posthumous qualification due to two miracles being attributed to him following his passing.
For those unaware, a miracle in the Catholic church occurs when a living person prays to someone who has passed away, and, in the process, that prayer has miraculous implications here on Earth.
Such was the case for Acutis, who was prayed to in two cases in completely different places in the world.
First, Acutis - who spent the majority of his life in Milan - was beautified upon his first recognized miracle in 2020, one that saw a priest in Brazil pray to the fallen millennial for a seven-year-old boy who was suffering from a severe pancreatic disorder that seemed as though it was going to take the young boy’s life.
However, his condition shockingly improved following this prayer–as well as the boy coming into contact with one of Acutis’s t-shirts–and led to the deceased millennial being blessed.
Then, more recently, a Costa Rican woman who suffered severe brain trauma due to a bicycle accident miraculously recovered from what was expected to be a life-ending injury.
Her mother, who prayed to Acutis and even went on a pilgrimage to the Italian town of Assisi, where the millennial is buried, considers her daughter’s recovery a miracle that should be attributed to the fallen boy.
With Pope Francis recognizing both these miracles as legitimate, Carlo Acutis is likely going to be officially canonized in the near future.
Dylan Murray