The Vatican’s New Low: Sainthood by Search Engine » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

The Catholic Church once canonized martyrs who were flayed alive, burned at the stake, torn apart by lions — all for refusing to renounce their faith. Today, it flirts with beatifying a teenager because he built a few websites and practiced modest screen time. Carlo Acutis, the teen, was set to be canonized as saint in April, but this was postponed after Pope Francis died.

Let me be clear: this is not a condemnation of Carlo, by all accounts a kind, pious, and unusually self-possessed youngster. But the Church is not called to venerate admirable teenagers. It is called to recognize lives of radical holiness — souls that stood toe-to-toe with the Devil, that bled and broke and loved anyway. Saints are meant to shake centuries, not trend on social media.

Canonizing Carlo is not an act of reverence — it’s an act of resignation. It’s the Church effectively saying: “This is the best we can offer now.” A teenager who wasn’t addicted to porn, who liked the Eucharist, who died of cancer rather than fentanyl, becomes our gold standard — not because his life was miraculous, but because it was relatively intact. Because in a shattered world, basic decency looks like divine intervention.

This isn’t holiness. It’s nostalgia. A beatification of our own despair.

Canonization is not a lifetime achievement award for being nice. It’s not about private piety sealed in amber. It’s about example. Saints are held up because their lives blaze a trail — through suffering, failure, temptation, and spiritual warfare — that others might follow. They are blueprints, not mascots. And the hard truth is this: Carlo Acutis didn’t live long enough to offer a blueprint for anything beyond a short, sheltered adolescence.

He didn’t marry. Didn’t battle addiction. Didn’t wrestle with faith in the dark night of the soul. He didn’t experience the slow martyrdom of daily sacrifice — paying rent, raising kids, burying parents, carrying a cross that doesn’t let you go. His death was tragic, yes. But sainthood is not a consolation prize for dying young.

Yes, Acutis loved the Eucharist. He helped the poor. He coded Catholic websites. So do thousands of kids every year — quietly, anonymously. The only difference? Carlo came of age at a time when even death can be packaged. In the age of digital canonization, brand beats battle. And the Church, terrified of irrelevance, is mistaking virtue for virality.

Now, let’s address the phrase that has been shamelessly paraded: God’s influencer. The Church has always used imagery and narrative to advance its mission. But in Acutis, we see something darker — a willingness to bow to modern marketing. The Church has essentially taken the worst label of our time, “influencer,” and sanctified it, as if Carlo’s holiness is somehow validated because he used the internet responsibly.

No matter how pure his intentions, calling Carlo an “influencer” is theologically absurd and culturally revealing. Saints are not supposed to mirror their age. They are supposed to rupture it. To resist its vices, not algorithmically repackage the faith into digestible digital slideshows.

St. Francis of Assisi renounced a life of wealth and rebuilt the Church by embracing radical poverty. St. Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to die in place of another man in Auschwitz. St. Catherine of Siena confronted Popes, challenged political corruption, and dictated theology while barely able to write. St. Ignatius of Loyola was a soldier who, after being shattered in battle, reoriented his fire into the spiritual war for souls.

These people didn’t go viral. They went to war — with themselves, with the culture, with the compromises of their time. Carlo Acutis made a website — a sincere and useful one, no doubt. But the Church’s eagerness to elevate that act into sainthood exposes something uncomfortable: we have lowered the bar, not out of love but out of despair.

If Acutis is canonized, he becomes the symbol of a new kind of saint: the digital-era ambassador. A feel-good figure for the Church to parade at World Youth Day. A Gen Z halo for a worldwide crisis of faith. But in doing so, the Vatican risks reducing sainthood to PR. It’s no longer about lives of rare and excruciating holiness — it’s about cultural optics.

And what message does this send to Catholics — young or old? That uploading content about the Eucharist is as saintly as dying in defense of it? That avoiding online porn and choosing to attend Mass makes you an icon of heroic virtue? We should absolutely encourage those things. But we should not canonize them.

Two miracles have been attributed to Carlo Acutis. One involves a Brazilian boy allegedly cured of a rare pancreatic disorder after praying to him. The other centers on a Florentine woman who survived a brain hemorrhage. Miracles, however, are not slam dunks. They’re not divine lightning bolts etched in stone. They’re interpretive events — messy, murky, often emotionally charged. The Church may call them “proof,” but what they really are is consensus storytelling wrapped in theological paperwork. And in an age desperate for signs and wonders — especially among the youth — it’s no surprise the Church is eager to greenlight anything that even smells like intervention.

But that eagerness warps discernment. When a spontaneous recovery or an unexplained remission becomes the litmus test for sainthood, the very concept of miracles begins to erode. Saints are not validated by anecdotal healings and Vatican news conferences. They’re sanctified by lives of radical, demonstrable holiness. If we start treating recovery stories like spiritual Yelp reviews, we don’t just cheapen miracles. We start canonizing sentiment.

And then there’s his mother.

Antonia Salzano has, in many ways, become the driving force behind Carlo’s canonization. Not as a passive witness, but as an active campaigner — his posthumous publicist, spiritual manager, and chief brand officer rolled into one. Her memoir, My Son Carlo, is undeniably moving. Any mother who has buried a child deserves compassion. But grief, however profound, is not a canonization criterion.

And one can’t help but notice how carefully crafted the messaging is — how clean the narrative, how perfectly Carlo fits the role of a modern saint, tailored to appeal to digital natives and lapsed Catholics alike. This isn’t just a boy being remembered. It’s a cause being marketed. A narrative being massaged. A legacy being monetized in the currency of sainthood.

That doesn’t make her a villain. It makes her human. Desperate, perhaps, to preserve her son’s memory in the most Catholic way possible. But sainthood must be more than a mother’s love transfigured into strategy. It must rise above biography. Saints are not made by memoirs. They’re forged in the fire of lives that shattered the world’s expectations — and reshaped it in God’s image. If we make Carlo a saint, we aren’t elevating him. We’re lowering the bar, and the Church with it.

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