It is roughly three o’clock in the afternoon in Assisi, and the chapel of St. Mary Maggiore is thronged with pilgrims. I hover above them, watching via a camera perched discreetly on the ceiling. The camera points down at a white casket. On the side of the casket is a window, through which I can see the body of a teenage boy: his jeans, his Nikes, his navy track jacket. The pilgrims proceed single file past the boy, who has been dead now for many years. As they pass his casket, some of them brush their fingers across it tenderly. They will do this until nightfall, when the tomb will be closed to visitors. It will remain open, however, to everyone on the internet, as it is at all hours of the day, every day of the year.

I discovered this by accident several months ago. I had viewed the livestream from the tomb of the Blessed Carlo Acutis early one morning, only to realize, later that night, that I had never closed the tab. It was one among many left over from the day—Gmail inbox, Twitter feed, Amazon cart, child’s tomb—and I clicked on it with a certain feeling of unease. When the room reappeared before me, I was startled by its emptiness. Though the lights in the chapel were dim, the casket was backlit and bright. I studied what I could see of Carlo through my monitor and the window into his coffin. Nothing moved in the chapel or in my browser, save the endlessly updating chat-room scroll of strangers’ pleas for his intercession: “Carlo I’m suffering horrobly [sic],” wrote someone with the username abortion=worst_CRIME_in_history.PERIOD!!! “Carlo . . . please grant me a wonder.” Watching from the calm of my apartment, I couldn’t help feeling like an intruder on the privacy of others’ prayers, on the privacy of another’s grave. The image was so still that I also began to doubt whether the video was actually streaming.

“Carlo was an absolutely normal boy,” insists the copy on his official website, carloacutis.com. But given that Carlo will be named a Catholic saint, some would argue that he is one of the least normal boys ever to live—or, for that matter, to die. In canonizing him, the Church declares that we know with certainty, from our ignorant position here on earth, that he is in heaven. A devout Catholic who attended Mass daily, Carlo was also a coder, a gamer, and a millennial. His generation’s first saint, he was born in 1991 and died in 2006 from leukemia, when he was only fifteen. His formal canonization during the Church’s Jubilee of Teenagers this April suggests that it is teenagers—or, at least, Generation Z—to whom the Church intends to proffer him as a role model. On TikTok, videos from his tomb have attracted hundreds of thousands of views and a chorus of bewildered commenters: “hey so this is insane”; “in the tracksuit is CRAZY”; “bro what 😭 ”; “Thank God for the Protestant reformation 🙏🙏🙏🙏 .”

Part of the widespread fascination with the young saint stems from the fact that his canonization “brings holiness into the third millennium,” in the words of one of his hagiographers. He enters the canon less than two decades after his death, even though the process, on average, takes nearly two hundred years. The vast majority of Catholic saints lived and died in a world we’d hardly recognize. The idea that a saint might know something of our time—and something of our childhoods—can be hard to wrap one’s head around. Carlo celebrated his First Communion one year after the premiere of South Park. His PlayStation could technically be categorized as a second-class relic, the Church’s classification for a saint’s personal belongings. (“Getting an extra 5,000 years in purgatory bc it turns out I talked smack to the bl. carlo acutis in a Halo 2 lobby in 2004,” one person joked on Twitter.) I was born the same year as Carlo, and I remember having a general sense, growing up in a world with cable TV and high-speed internet, that no teenage boy would ever see heaven. According to the Church, Carlo entered the kingdom of God the same year that I snuck into a movie theater to see Borat without my parents. If it’s true, as Catholics say, that all of us are called to be saints, no one I knew was answering that call in the tenth grade.

The unlikeliness of such a contemporary saint has led to a staggering amount of enthusiasm for Carlo’s cause. Since his beatification in 2020, Carlo has become the object of more popular devotion than many a veteran saint. In Chicago, there is a parish of the Blessed Carlo Acutis, and there’s another of the same name in England; there’s a shrine to him at a church in New Jersey that Carlo’s mother furnished with an ornate reliquary containing a strand of his hair. Michael O’Neill, the self-proclaimed “Miracle Hunter” who hosts a podcast and television show of the same name, keeps a relic of Carlo on his desk. As O’Neill explained on his podcast, Carlo, too, was a miracle hunter of sorts, one who used the web to further his work. Carlo has been touted as “the patron saint of the internet” and “God’s influencer,” owing to his exhaustive efforts researching and cataloguing eucharistic miracles on his website.

By elevating a teen coder to sainthood, the Church suggests that science and technology need not be at odds with faith. In fact, this has long been the position of the Vatican: a miracle cannot be confirmed without the approval of scientific experts, who help to validate the claims associated with each candidate for sainthood. The vast majority of those are miracles of a medical nature. And the Church holds that two miracles, when attributed to a specific candidate’s intercession, offer proof that a saint really is with God in heaven. The other miraculous events and experiences that make up the wide world of Catholic spirituality (apparitions, levitations, bilocations, stigmata, and so-called moral miracles) rarely furnish the sort of evidence that would allow the investigators at the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints to rule out natural causes. Carlo’s canonization, however, has come at an inflection point in the history of the miraculous. Shortly before the Church confirmed the second healing miracle attributed to his intercession, the Vatican published a document overhauling its process for confirming supernatural phenomena, the first such revision since 1978.

Some commentators suspect that the revised guidelines were, in part, occasioned by the decades-long controversy over Our Lady of Medjugorje, the inspiration for an immensely popular pilgrimage site in Bosnia, where, in 1981, six people claimed to have seen and received messages from the Virgin Mary. The visionaries maintain that they have received prophecies, sometimes on an hourly basis, ever since. The Church has come to regard the phenomenon with some embarrassment, and last summer employed the new guidelines to render a long-awaited verdict of nihil obstat. This judgment is not a confirmation of the visionaries’ supernatural claims but a hedged endorsement of the site’s devotional appeal—in effect, the Vatican’s equivalent of “we can neither confirm nor deny.” The Vatican’s new classifications make possible such expressions of ambivalence. In any case, the guidelines will have the inevitable effect, one commentator writes, of disenchanting the world. By withdrawing authority to declare miracles from local officials, Rome ensures that there will be fewer miracles in the future.

The internet era has thus become a less miraculous one, which would seem to belie the pope’s optimistic insistence that the internet “is something truly good.” So, in some respects, does the canonization of Carlo himself. In hagiographies, his adolescence unfolds in the sweetly declarative sentences of a picture book: he played soccer, he built websites, he played video games, he loved Jesus. He did many of the normal things that normal teenagers do—except, of course, grow up. Or get an Instagram account. He will remain forever in high school, forever in 2006. The simplicity of his childhood is, like his PlayStation—and like his body—a relic from a different age. The patron saint of the internet never so much as held an iPhone. God’s influencer never knew what an influencer was. He never participated in a viral dance trend, never sent or received a Snapchat message, never surrendered his adolescence to powerful corporate algorithms. Ironically, only in death has he become what teenagers now are in life: eternally online.

Carlo was the only child of Antonia Salzano and Andrea Acutis, a financial executive. But not long after his death, according to Antonia, Carlo appeared to her in a dream to inform her that she could once again expect to be a mother. Four years to the day since Carlo’s death, Antonia gave birth to twins. She was forty-four years old. This story, repeated over the years in the press, is one of many miracles that have been attributed to Carlo since he died. In 2013, a four-year-old boy with a severe pancreatic abnormality underwent a total and inexplicable recovery after touching a relic of Carlo. A few years later, a Costa Rican woman visited Carlo’s tomb and prayed for her daughter, who had entered a coma after a traumatic bike accident. That same day, her daughter began to breathe on her own again. Scans of her brain showed that her hemorrhage had disappeared.

What qualifies a person for the canon is their demonstration of what the Church calls heroic virtue. Once a local bishop takes up the cause for canonization, a Vatican investigator called a postulator is enlisted to draft a petition—a document detailing evidence of a candidate’s heroic virtues. To compose a petition, which can be hundreds of pages long, the postulator enlists the help of historians or, if the candidate died within living memory, interviews those who knew them. What we know of Carlo’s life—all fifteen years of it—we know mostly from what his parents, classmates, teachers, medical team, and domestic staff have told either the press or the postulator during the preparation of Carlo’s petition.

Though he was born in London, Carlo grew up in Milan, as secular a city as you’ll find in Italy. His parents were worldly, wealthy, and, like many Milanese, Catholic only in the cultural sense. At the beginning of her memoir, My Son Carlo, Antonia writes that, prior to Carlo’s birth, she had been to Mass all of three times: for her baptism, her First Communion, and her wedding. As a young child, however, Carlo peppered her with questions about Catholicism, to which he seems to have been introduced through the faith of his Polish nanny. To better answer her son’s questions, Antonia began to educate herself in the religion of her birth. In her telling, she emerged from this belated catechesis a true believer, inspired by the unexpected piety of her young son. Later, Carlo began to attend Mass escorted by the family’s Hindu housekeeper, who would later cite Carlo’s devotion as the inspiration for his own conversion to Catholicism.

Together, such stories—of conversion and reconversion—paint a portrait of a child who evangelized when he was still in elementary school. His passion for the Eucharist—what he is said to have called his “highway to heaven”—is the quality most often celebrated by his hagiographers. Only 30 percent of self-identified Catholics profess belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation, a fact that has long been a source of consternation in the Church. Toward the end of his life, Carlo prepared a presentation, later to be preserved on his website, on the history of eucharistic miracles. These are the miracles that Michael O’Neill describes as his favorite kind: if you accept, for instance, that a consecrated Host in Buenos Aires transformed overnight into the bloody tissue of a human heart in 1996, then you “have to be Catholic.” But belief in miracles seldom requires any such faith. One of the ironies of our broadly secular age is that while religion has waned in the Western world, belief in the supernatural has not.

In 2008, the Pew Research Center found that nearly eight out of ten surveyed adults believed that “miracles still occur today as in ancient times.” And while the pews at Catholic churches have grown emptier, the demand for exorcisms, even among non-Catholics, remains high. O’Neill believes his programs can “open the door” to faith, in part because his own engineering background gives him credibility with skeptics and nonbelievers. But there is no easy correlation between one’s acceptance of the supernatural and belief in a divinely ordered universe; you can have one, evidently, without the other. Even the Church doesn’t require Catholics to believe in most of the miracles it approves; classified as “private revelations,” they are not included in “the deposit of faith.”

I wondered about the meaning of Carlo’s canonization in a disenchanted age. Many of the most famous saints, including Carlo’s beloved St. Francis, were believed to possess extraordinary powers that would make them, in many ways, the total opposite of an “absolutely normal boy.” And yet Carlo is laid to rest in Assisi, where St. Francis stripped naked and surrendered himself to God.

In October, I traveled to Assisi with a pilgrimage group to visit Carlo’s tomb on his feast day, the annivarsary of his death, the first since the news broke of his impending canonization. The city remains an architectural time capsule of the Middle Ages. For an American tourist like me—more familiar with the scenic vistas of the New Jersey Turnpike—its basilicas and winding medieval streets are inexhaustibly beautiful. But for a normal Italian teenager, it is surely almost indescribably boring. Because its attractions are almost exclusively historical and spiritual, Assisi is not a place, in the words of our tour guide, where you go to have fun. It is a place you go to pray.

According to his father, Assisi was Carlo’s favorite place. In 2019, his body was exhumed and placed on display in the Church of St. Mary Maggiore. His tomb opened to the public in October 2020, for the Church’s nineteen-day celebration of his beatification, during which it received more than 41,000 visitors despite intense pandemic-related travel restrictions. Though he has been dead now for nineteen years, he looks rosy-cheeked, pristine, and remarkably alive, owing to the silicone that the Church has fitted over his face and hands. His lifelike appearance has led to some confusion. When his tomb first opened, breathless rumors began to circulate online that his remains had been discovered “incorrupt.” Eventually, the archbishop of Assisi clarified that, although Carlo’s body had been “reassembled with art and love,” his remains were found “in the normal state of transformation typical of the cadaveric condition.”

Carlo’s tomb has become a popular site for pilgrims, but most are drawn to Assisi, as Carlo had been himself, by devotion to St. Francis. The pilgrimage in which I had enrolled promised to follow “in the footsteps of Blessed Carlo Acutis,” which was also to follow in the footsteps of the city’s patron saint. To study the saints is to enter a hall of holy mirrors: saints become saints by imitating other saints who themselves imitated Christ. The remains of St. Clare, the founder of the order of nuns known as the Poor Clares, are also in Assisi; she was herself called to religious life by the example of Francis. Among the relics displayed in her basilica are coiled, white-blond locks of her hair that look, at a distance, like vermicelli noodles. In the basilica that houses Francis’s ugly, hulking stone tomb, his cassock is on display along with bandages stained with his blood. The Cathedral of San Rufino, not far from where Carlo is laid to rest, contains a first-class relic taken from Carlo’s heart.

On the eighteenth anniversary of Carlo’s death, my fellow pilgrims and I went to venerate the relic. It was quiet. Most of the feast-day crowds were evidently at Carlo’s tomb. San Rufino, which dates back to the eleventh century, is not the most beautiful, or the most significant, of Assisi’s scores of churches and chapels, but it eclipsed the grandeur of every Catholic church in America that I had ever known. Enormous paintings of Christ and the Virgin Mary hung from the walls, framed by scrolling masonry. Glass built into the floor showed the crumbling remains of Roman architecture beneath. Carlo’s shrine stood off to the side, the reliquary protected behind a screen. Beside it hung the most familiar portrait of Carlo, in which he squints into the sun, half-smiling in the way that teenagers do to indulge a parent behind the lens.

We gathered in the pews before the shrine to pray a decade of the rosary, which I hadn’t done since a religion class I took as a teenager. As we prayed, what I took to be a class of Italian middle schoolers shuffled by. They were not much younger, I realized, than Carlo had been himself at the time of his death. They giggled, kicked at one another’s shoes, and, as we prayed, stared into our faces with a frank zoological curiosity. One boy, littler than the rest, whipped around and knocked over a candle with his backpack. A taller boy caught it midair and replaced it gently. They were not misbehaving, not really. They were just being preteens on a school trip, content in the knowledge that no one actually expected them to learn whatever it was they were supposed to be learning. Every now and then, one of them glanced at Carlo’s relic with flat, unseeing eyes, as though at a streetlamp. For the first time, I felt a kinship with Carlo. I knew nothing of his piety, but as a teacher I knew very much what it was like to bore schoolchildren.

After all, he was dead and they were alive. It seemed that he was no more a part of their world than the old paintings that hung above us or the Roman ruins below. I lingered by the shrine for a few minutes longer, trying to estimate the size of a human heart, the number of relics it could yield if you sliced it as thinly as pages of a Bible, wondering whether a heart so divided would be diminished or multiplied. Then a boy of about ten, in a knit hat and a puffy coat, trotted up to the shrine. His father followed close behind. Together, we watched in silence as the boy, standing on tiptoe, reached up and spread his fingers against the glass, as though to warm them by what lay on the other side.

The Italians I meet love to remind people that St. Francis was ugly. It’s true that medieval art doesn’t do him any favors. The frescoes on the walls of his basilica depict him as a tiny man with enormous ears, the top of his tonsured head seemingly abashed by its own baldness. Francis is nevertheless one of the greatest Catholic saints. He is also Christianity’s most famous stigmatist: two years before his death in 1226, marks appeared on his hands and feet suggestive of crucifixion. These, along with the wound in his side that also matched Jesus’, reportedly bled and caused him enormous pain. Receiving stigmata constitutes a miracle in Catholicism, and Francis was believed to possess several other miraculous powers. According to some accounts, Francis was able to levitate and appear in two locations at once.

The order that takes his name, the Franciscans, is known for its production of wonder-workers capable of similar feats. One of the most famous of these, St. Joseph of Cupertino, lived for a time in Assisi. In his recent book They Flew, the historian Carlos Eire relates a staggering number of historical accounts of Joseph flying in spiritual rapture. One of those accounts describes him balancing on the uppermost branches of a tree, like a bird. Joseph insisted that his flights were involuntary; he was reported to have been greatly distressed by them. He supposedly could not even take Communion without floating off the ground. News of his raptures spread widely, and Joseph became a sensation, drawing pilgrims and spectators from across the region hoping to bear witness. The Church evidently found Joseph’s levitations no less distressing than he did. It removed him to a secret location at some point, and made him attend Mass in private to conceal his gravity-defying ecstasies. While those who witnessed Joseph’s levitations took them as a confirmation of the faith, the Church evidently found them to be a distraction from it.

The same can be said of Padre Pio, another Franciscan who bore the stigmata. Like Carlo, he is regarded as a symbol of twenty-first-century sanctity, hailed at the time of his canonization, in 2002, as “the saint of the new millennium.” Stories abound of Pio’s bilocations and healing miracles, and he was believed to be able to “read souls.” But none of his miracles were more concerning to the Church—or more inspiring to the faithful—than his stigmata. Aware of the possibility that Pio’s wounds were faked, the Vatican investigated; those who were with him at his death reportedly claimed that the stigmata disappeared completely, without leaving any scars. By then, he had already become a figure of international devotion. His funeral in 1968 was attended by more than one hundred thousand people, and his tomb continues to receive around seven million visitors a year.

Pio was canonized thirty-four years after his death. Ironically, it was Pio’s reputation as a wonder-worker that, for a time, stalled his cause for canonization. Although miracles are essential to the faith, the relentless demand for them irritated no less than Jesus himself: “Why are you afraid, you men of little faith?” Miracle workers have a way of causing trouble for Church authorities. While supernatural events can establish the sanctity of a saint—and, by extension, the holiness of the Church—they also attract scrutiny. For much of its history, the Church has had to defend itself against accusations that levitations, apparitions, and other miracles were not the work of God but that of the devil. Miracle workers, moreover, often become the subjects of so much popular devotion that their authority can begin to approach idolatry or rival that of the Church itself. A visionary may claim to have received a message from the Virgin Mary that contradicts Church doctrine, for instance. But while a future saint has the power to challenge Church authority, a person cannot be canonized without it.

Carlo, who was not a spiritual celebrity in his lifetime, will enter the canon fifteen years faster than Padre Pio did. The unusually rapid progression of his cause has been noted by some with frustration. carlo acutis rushed to sainthood while others wait centuries for the honor, complained a headline in the New York Post. Carlo, who was relatively unknown even in Italy when his cause was first declared, will be canonized before Dorothy Day, the American intellectual who led the Catholic Worker Movement. Though supporters have been pushing for her canonization for decades, her cause has stalled at the Vatican, at least in part because her radical left-wing politics are in tension with the Church. The causes of other would-be saints have also languished while Carlo’s proceeded apace. “The cause of a good-looking computer-programming teenager is possibly too irresistible for a Church eager to recruit a new generation of smartphone-addicted youths,” as the New York Post put it.

Unlike the saints he adored, Carlo was not a wonder-worker or mystic. Some Catholics find him too ordinary, and too juvenile, to inspire devotion. But the pedestrian nature of his life—and its brevity—arguably eased his entry into the canon. Since he was never a public figure, he never made statements that could irritate the Church. Since he wasn’t a wonder-worker or a visionary, he never made claims that aroused suspicion. What he didn’t do seems to have been as important to his cause as what he did do. This is certainly true with regard to his chastity, which Catholic writers extol in devotional literature. His mother describes him closing his eyes during risqué TV commercials, and he is reported to have described the Virgin Mary as “the only woman in my life.” During all those hours at his computer, he supposedly never visited any pornographic sites. (Vatican investigators reviewed his browsing history.) And, of course, he never became an adult. The most extraordinary quality of Carlo’s life—true of the lives of many saints—is how it ended.

One day in late September 2006, Carlo came home from school feeling more tired than usual. No one thought much of it. His PE teacher had made him run laps around the soccer field that day. The school year was still fresh, the weather beautiful, so Carlo and his mother took their dogs for a walk. The next day, when Antonia took her son’s temperature, she saw that he had run up a fever. She gave him Tylenol, sent him to bed, and decided to keep him home from school. He would never return.

In many ways, My Son Carlo—the memoir of a mother who not only outlived her son but lived to see him made a saint—is singular. But in its detailed attention to the anguish of her son’s last days, it hews close to the spirit of more conventional hagiographies. “Another important lesson that Carlo left for young people is how to die,” writes Nicola Gori, the postulator of his cause, in his preface to Carlo Acutis: The First Millennial Saint. This is a shocking, even repulsive statement about a child that is nevertheless an accurate statement about a Catholic saint. A saint’s death, no less than their life, is meant to be emulated. For much of church history, the communion of saints was largely a communion of martyrs, and to read about their lives was to reflect, by necessity, on the extravagant horror of their deaths. But Carlo was not a martyr. While he died with great faith, he didn’t die, properly speaking, for the faith. He never suffered on the rack or the wheel or from the other torments that befell the saints in the age of Christian persecution and beyond. But to read Antonia’s book is to be reminded how agonizing even a modern, medicalized death can be.

Over the course of a few days, Carlo became progressively sicker. Together, Antonia and Andrea hoisted their son—too tall to be carried, too weak to stand—into his desk chair, wheeled him into the apartment’s elevator, and loaded him into the car. At the hospital, doctors diagnosed him with a rare, aggressive form of leukemia that, Antonia writes, “does not reveal itself until the last minute.” He was transferred to the ICU, where nurses hooked him up to a machine to help him breathe. The device, he told his mother, was torture, worsening his pain by suppressing his cough. The illness itself he described as a “wake-up call” from God. He had difficulty speaking. Still, he asked his mother to help him to recite the rosary before she left. As she prayed with her dying son, the words from the Book of Job “bounced around” in her mind: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Per his own request, Carlo received the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. “My husband and I were convinced that the Lord would perform a miracle and heal him until the very end,” Antonia writes in her memoir. “But that is not what happened.” On October 11, Carlo had a cerebral hemorrhage and went into a coma. At 6:45 the next morning, his heart stopped. The disease, they told his mother, had made his organs unfit for donation. Morticians came to the hospital to prepare his body. His parents brought him home and laid him out on the bed in his childhood bedroom. Less than a week had passed between Carlo’s diagnosis and his death. “I looked at it, and it did not seem real,” Antonia writes of her son’s body. “Carlo was not here anymore.”

On the afternoon of Carlo’s feast day, I went to St. Mary Maggiore to see his body in person. Of all the churches I had seen in Assisi, St. Mary Maggiore was among the simplest. Frescoes depicting the life of Christ had evidently crumbled away. Carlo’s tomb is in the corner of the main nave, visible through an archway almost as soon as you enter. Across from his casket is a wooden observation bench, where I sat for the better part of an hour. A group of nuns stood nearby, gazing at Carlo with a calm intensity. When people touched the window on his casket, I felt an irrational flash of disapproval, as though they were tapping on the side of a fish tank. At one point, someone came by with a rag to wipe down the glass, blurred by so many fingerprints.

I wondered what Antonia thinks of her son’s body now, buried and then exhumed, wearing a face that is not his face. The silicone makes him look older somehow. He’s missing the baby fat he has in pictures. These are his remains: after so many years in the grave, there’s little of them left. His head rests on a white pillow; his hands clutch a rosary. Much has been made of his Nikes, and the Church’s decision to display him this way has always struck me as a canny bit of image-making. The shoes look new: in a sense, they always will be. It seemed that what so obsessed people online about Carlo’s tomb was how out of place he looked in his outfit—the jeans, the Nikes—but it seemed right to me that a fifteen-year-old should look out of place in a casket.

A prominent sign warned that photography was prohibited. It was roundly ignored. Everyone from teenage girls to Franciscan monks whipped out smartphones to take photos of Carlo as they passed. The ushers didn’t say a word. Why should they? I looked up and saw, in the corner of the ceiling, a small camera peering down at us, the same one from which I had viewed Carlo’s resting place all those months ago. Carlo’s image is being captured every second of every day. “All people are born as originals, but many die as photocopies,” Carlo is supposed to have said; the line is often quoted in the Catholic devotional literature as an implicit rebuke of the shallow conformism of the social-media age. And yet now, in death, his own image is copied by hundreds of thousands of smartphones, replicated endlessly on the internet.

At times it seems that promoters of Carlo’s cause find his every recorded utterance profound. But “All people are born as originals, but many die as photocopies” is an unoriginal expression of an unoriginal teenage sentiment—which is precisely why it’s so touching. It is a little trite, a little self-dramatizing, exactly the sort of thing that an ordinary teenager would say. It is the sort of thing that Holden Caulfield would say, a condemnation of adult phoniness. Carlo died right before social media prompted every teenager to keep a running public archive of their thoughts, so most of what we know him by are these little phrases that his loved ones have remembered, and perhaps misremembered, through the years. As a group of tearful teen girls snapped a selfie in front of his casket, I looked up at a light fixture engraved with another of his supposed favorite sayings: Non io, ma Dio. “Not me, but God.”

Last year, Bishop Robert Barron, who might be the Church’s foremost public intellectual, addressed the topic of miracles on an episode of his weekly podcast, Word on Fire. Though the Church does not require Catholics to accept the validity of post-apostolic miracles, they nonetheless play an important role in the life of the faithful, Barron explains. While the very existence of the natural world is itself an expression of God’s power, God at times intervenes in the normal affairs of the world as a “sign” or a “shout” to command our attention. Such miracles, Barron says, are best understood not as an interruption of the natural order but as an intensification of it.

This explanation seeks to reconcile belief in miracles with a broadly scientific view of the world, which is also the apparent aim of the Vatican’s new miracle guidelines. Apparitions, visions, and prophecies are the miracles that nonbelievers are most likely to greet with skepticism, and these are precisely the types of miracles that the Vatican has now largely relegated to an epistemological limbo. By contrast, most nonreligious people accept the possibility of spontaneous remissions, inexplicable recoveries, and the rest of the medical mysteries that the Church calls healing miracles. In the wake of the new guidelines, the supernatural occurrences that the Church validates will now largely be limited to this variety.

I doubt very much that your average teenager cares whether the Vatican has been overly credulous. A stricter approach is necessary—not for him, I imagine, but for whatever poor Vatican official is tasked with sorting through Instagram posts of burnt-toast Jesuses and AI hallucinations of the Virgin Mary. It is easy to see how the internet could make validating many miraculous claims a bureaucratic nightmare, if not an outright impossibility. These miraculous claims, it seems, vex the Church for the same reason the internet does: The Church is one of the oldest and most centralized authorities in the world, and miracles, like the internet, disperse power. Miraculous claims can be made by anyone, anywhere, and so allow anyone, anywhere, to claim spiritual authority.

Though Carlo’s enthusiasm for eucharistic miracles has been the most publicized fact about him, he also built a website tracking Marian apparitions and other miracles. He made pilgrimages to both Fátima, in Portugal, where the Virgin appeared to three young children, and to Lourdes, in France, where St. Bernadette received a vision of the Virgin when she was only fourteen. Of the Marian apparitions the Church has confirmed, a remarkable number were received by children or adolescents. This isn’t all that surprising: children can often lack a causal understanding of the world, and so are receptive to experiences that challenge it. So, too, are teenagers, who are stubborn enough to insist on their interpretation of reality in the face of adult frustration. The visionaries at Medjugorje claimed to speak to the Virgin every day for the better part of a year, and every day for the better part of a year they were dragged out of school and interrogated by the Bosnian secret police, who were determined to make them recant their claims. They never did.

I am not particularly surprised by this fact. Nor, I suspect, is anyone else who works with teenagers. A teenager can easily accept that, of all the billions of people who live on this planet, the Virgin Mary would favor him with a personal visit. Call it hubris, if you want, or a justifiable suspension of disbelief. Every few months, a teen does something that was only recently beyond him. He inhabits a world where all things are possible.

Or he wants to, at any rate. In the Middle Ages, theologians debated the meaning of the end of the so-called age of miracles, thought to have concluded with the first century ad. Wonder-working is commonplace in both the Old and New Testaments, and Jesus exhorted all his followers to heal the sick and raise the dead. Miracles seemed comparatively rare in subsequent centuries, a decline that Christians interpreted in contradictory ways. Perhaps wonders were no longer necessary to galvanize faith in an era of widespread Christianity, or perhaps the scarcity of miracles revealed a decrease in sanctity throughout the ages. The fact that this question can be taken up in the twenty-first century suggests that any era can seem disenchanted to the people living in it. The sense of belatedness—the feeling that one is living in a time of diminished wonder—is perhaps inherent to Christian belief, which holds that the Savior came and went thousands of years ago. But it is also a feeling, I’ve noticed, common among even the most profane of teenagers.

The Church celebrates Carlo for his contemporariness, but the patron saint of the twenty-first century seems to have preferred the twelfth. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield’s happiest moments are in the American Museum of Natural History, where he takes comfort in the taxidermied relics of a vanished world. I rarely meet a teenage boy who isn’t nostalgic for a time he never actually knew. He lives in an era when chatbots can do his homework, when he can watch sports highlights in the middle of class, and yet still he binges episodes of Friends, fascinated by a time when people hung out at one another’s houses without the distraction of smartphones. People like to suggest that the young have replaced God with an idolatrous relationship with technology, but this seems, in part, a projection. No one, in my experience, is more disillusioned with technology than the American teenage boy, precisely because he’s so dependent on it. He makes fun of his classmates for their excessive screen time; he diagnoses his peers with phone-induced “brain rot.” He is convinced that the life he’s living—governed by school and homework, mediated increasingly by screens—is not real life. He is, more than anyone I know, desperate to be amazed.

The night of the feast day, the pilgrims and I returned to the Church of St. Mary Maggiore for a celebration. It was late, after ten o’clock, and the weather was crisp and autumnal. We had arrived a little early to get seats, and the nave was already mostly filled. I took a seat in the back, by myself. I could see the altar at the front of the church as well as the pilgrims who had made their way to the corner to visit with Carlo on the anniversary of his death.

At the front of the church, a man began to sing in Spanish. I had hoped that there might be some remarks from the archbishop of Assisi or even from Carlo’s parents, who were rumored to be in attendance. But song followed song without interruption, and I resigned myself to an hour or two of sing-alongs. I had spent more than enough Sundays as a child watching earnest men sing worship music while strumming an acoustic guitar, and I greeted the approaching tedium as an old friend. People are drawn to the faith for many reasons, but as a child I felt confident—and am confident now—that churchy guitar music isn’t one of them.

The crowd, like the music, exuded a gentle warmth. Most people seemed to be couples, or else parents with children. As the minutes passed, I looked around the church, at the frescoes and the singer and the people joining in, noting the passage of time, guessing the number of minutes that remained until I could go back to my lumpy hotel bed and eat the half of the cannoli I had saved for my return, and then all of a sudden I was crying: boredom, boredom, boredom, crying. I will not pretend that this was a religious epiphany. It was perhaps only the inevitable, if belated, response to months spent thinking about a teenager’s death. I had come to Assisi in order to see Carlo’s body up close, and yet I had been unwilling to acknowledge that the most important manifestation of his ordinariness was the fact that he was dead. To look at him in his grave, however artfully reassembled, is to look squarely at this fact.

Carlo’s transformation from living person to holy object was accomplished despite a vastness of human suffering—his own, his parents’—that was virtually unbearable to contemplate. It should have made his body unbearable to behold—at least for me, a person who could not see in it the promise of eternal life. But its proximity felt somehow stabilizing, even through my tears. To the modern secular mind, the veneration of relics suggests a fetishistic obsession with death. But this attitude would be a failure to see beyond one’s fetishistic relationship with just about everything else. Many millennials, myself included, were delighted by the news of Carlo’s canonization because it seemed to allow the commodities that transfixed us in childhood—the Pokémon cards, the PlayStations, the Nikes—to accrue some greater meaning through this unusual Vatican acknowledgment. The objects we worshipped would become eligible for veneration in actual houses of worship.

Toward the end of the night, the singer called out for us in the audience to embrace one another, or so I gathered from the fact that the people around me began to embrace. I stood there awkwardly, smiling and sniffling, until I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. I turned around and a slender teenage girl with long brown hair hugged me silently. Beside her, a woman I took to be her mother beckoned me toward her and did the same. I remember feeling startled, not by the kindness of the gesture but by the unexpected warmth of their arms. It is hard for me to believe that the dead continue on, and harder still for me to believe that they continue thinking about us. Why should they bestow favors on the living? Why should we deserve it? But those people in the church that night seemed to me worthy of a saint’s concern. As they praised God a few steps away from a child’s casket, no one would dare call their faith naïve. Because of their devotion, no one could call the child lonely in his tomb. Every now and again, someone in the pews would peel away from the celebration to go stand beside Carlo in the corner of the church, as though to keep him company. We watched over him in Assisi while the viewers on the livestream watched over him from above, hoping that he, in turn, is watching over us, too.