London-born boy died aged 15 to become first saint of the millennium

A London-born teenager who died of leukemia in 2006 is set to become the Catholic Church's first millennial saint, after Pope Francis officially recognized a second miracle attributed to Carlo Acutis.

The late teenager, who moved with his family to Milan in Italy when he was a child, is known as the patron saint of the internet among Roman Catholics and has been called an “influencer of God”.

According to a Vatican press release released Thursday, the recognized miracle concerns a Costa Rican woman, Liliana, whose daughter Valeria Valverde, 21, suffered serious head trauma following a bicycle accident in Florence on July 2, 2022.

The Vatican says Valeria underwent critical surgery and her chances of survival were slim, according to her doctors. Liliana is said to have prayed at the tomb of Carlo Acutis in Assisi on July 8, when his secretary had already started praying to him.

The same day, according to the Vatican, Valeria began breathing on her own and the next day she regained some movement and speech. On July 18, a scan showed that her hemorrhage had disappeared, and she entered rehabilitation on August 11, making rapid progress.

Pope Francis announced a meeting of cardinals to discuss making Acutis a saint, according to the Vatican statement.

In 2020, he became the youngest person in the modern era to be beatified (the first step to becoming a saint) after allegedly curing a Brazilian boy, Mattheus Vianna, of a severe birth defect that made eating difficult.

Acutis created a website to catalog miracles and ran websites for local Catholic organizations in Italy before his death from leukemia in 2006. He was 15.

“Carlo was the light-hearted answer to the dark side of the web,” said his mother Antonia Acutis. The New York Times in 2020 after being beatified and put on the path to sainthood in the Catholic Church.

Ms Acutis said at the age of seven he began attending daily mass. Her son's life, she said, “can be used to show how the Internet can be used for good, to spread good things.”

After Acutis' death, the diocese of Assisi petitioned the Vatican for his sainthood. They reviewed his emails and computer search history and interviewed witnesses while waiting for miracles to support his case.

In February of that year, Pope Francis credited Acutis with the miraculous healing of a Brazilian boy with a pancreatic malformation after the child allegedly touched one of Carlo's shirts.

According to a 2017 report by the National Catholic Register, only 120 of the more than 10,000 saints recognized by the Roman Catholic Church died as children or teenagers.

The Vatican has not yet announced a date for the official canonization ceremony.

Before Acutis, the last saint born in England was Cardinal John Henry Newman, who died in 1890 at the age of 89. He was canonized by Pope Francis in 2019. According to the Catholic News Agency, the first miracle attributed to Cardinal Newman was the inexplicable healing of a deacon suffering from a serious spinal illness.

The second involved a pregnant American woman who recovered from a life-threatening diagnosis after praying for Newman's intercession, with doctors unable to explain her sudden recovery.