Carlo Acutis
Capped his own gaming at an hour a week, long before anyone had a word for that.
- Lived
- 1991 – 2006
- Feast
- October 12
- Tradition
- Western
- Veneration
- Beatified 10 October 2020 in Assisi; canonized 7 September 2025 by Pope Leo XIV in St Peter's Square (Catholic Church)
- Patron of
- Young people and computer programmers; widely invoked as patron of the internet, though no formal patronage has been decreed
He was eight when he got a PlayStation and decided that one hour a week was enough. He had watched friends turn on each other over a console in his own living room, and he drew a line. He held it — through Halo, Pokémon, Mario, all of it — for the seven years he had left.
What he did with the rest of the time is the strange part. He taught himself to code, and as a teenager built a website and a travelling exhibition cataloguing reported Eucharistic miracles, country by country, dates and sources attached. It opened on 4 October 2006. Eight days later he was dead of leukaemia in Monza, fifteen years old.
Ignore whatever has been built on top of him since. The fact worth keeping is small and entirely his own: a boy who noticed what a screen was doing to his attention, set a limit, and did not move it.
- Born: London
- Died: Monza
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