Over the summer, the story of Carlo Acutis made headlines at gaming sites: Acutis, who died of leukemia at age 15 in 2006, is set to be canonized by the Catholic Church at the end of April, making him the first millennial to become a saint. While the word “saint” probably conjures up martyrs and monastics from centuries past, Acutis was by all accounts a regular 2000s-era kid. He was a devout Catholic who attended daily Mass, but he also played soccer, hung out with friends, and played video games. He’s said to have owned a PlayStation and enjoyed Halo, Pokemon, and Mario games, though he limited his gaming time to an hour a week.
Acutis has a global following, like many figures who’ve gone through the long, rigorous process of sainthood. His tomb sees plenty of visitors in person and via livestream. A church in England has a stained-glass window of his likeness, complete with cell phone. There was an attempt to make a video game about his life in 2023, though its Kickstarter was cancelled and there’s been no word of it since. The Church recently spoke out against the online market for his relics.
But for all this popularity, there’s also a certain “how do you do, fellow kids” energy to the way he’s been labelled “God’s influencer” and “the patron saint of the internet.” The attention his gaming habits have received reinforces the idea that there’s something irreligious about video games, and the strict limits he set on himself further drives that home. And, for all his purported relatability, what we know about his internet usage isn’t the “like and subscribe” YouTube videos or secret fan fiction sites you might expect of kids today: Instead, he made a website for his local church and one cataloging eucharistic miracles. He died before Facebook became ubiquitous, and shortly after the first tweet hit the internet. What example can the internet’s unofficial “patron saint” really set, especially for young people, if he was so strict with his gaming time and didn’t live long enough to regret going on TikTok?
To talk about all this, I reached out to Shane Liesegang, SJ, who worked on games like Fallout 4 and Skyrim before joining the Jesuits. While he still works on personal projects and bigger games from time to time, these days he’s a scholastic living in the Philippines studying migrant theology; over email, Liesegang tells me “Basically migrants and refugees are kind of my ‘vocation within a vocation.’”
The road to sainthood
The first thing Liesegang points out to me is that the word “saint” is a lot more complicated than many people understand it to be: “The Church’s definition of a saint is, simply, someone who is in heaven,” he says. “This is distinct from the title of ‘Saint,’ which indicates a person has been authoritatively declared to be a saint by the Church in the process of canonization. That is, they have been added to the list of saints considered to be authentic and trustworthy… Thus we get the repeated phrase that only God makes someone a saint; the Church merely recognizes it. So there are, of course, substantial numbers of saints that are not canonized, and who are in fact entirely unknown outside their most immediate context.”
The process by which someone officially becomes a saint has changed over the centuries, but these days involves rigorous investigation into their life (Liesegang tells me, “Imagine the deepest, most thorough background check possible and then also imagine how far it can go when there is no rush.”). This process also includes what might be the biggest stumbling block to modern people: verifying a saint’s miracles.
Liesegang says a saint’s miracles are “basically considered as ‘proofs’ that the person made it into heaven and now has some sway.” Acutis’ first miracle occurred in 2013, when a Brazilian woman claimed her son, who’d suffered from a lifetime of digestive issues due to a pancreatic disorder, was able to eat normally after praying to Acutis for healing. His second miracle involved a woman who suffered head trauma after falling off her bike in 2022; the woman’s mother prayed for healing at Acutis’ tomb, after which it’s said her daughter’s condition promptly began to improve.
While Liesegang points out that the Pope “can basically give you credit for a life of virtue and let that count” as a number of the required miracles, inexplicable healings and their like “do seem to fly in the face of our rigorously scientific and materialist worldview. So here I will say: you might be surprised at the stringency of the standard the Church applies when it determines miracles to be genuine. Medical miracles require a team of neutral doctors to vote [multiple times].… The investigation process on these things is staggeringly thorough — if they found anything that made them question [Acutis' cause as a whole, it], would have been stopped.”
The line between a miracle and something medicine can’t yet explain might be a thin one, up to interpretation. Father Angelo Romano, the general relator of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, told The Guardian in its fantastic deep-dive into the sainthood process, “The way miracles are seen has obviously changed as the world has changed… The question is: what is today the state of the art of medicine? We have to judge from the present moment of knowledge… We cannot judge based on what you might discover tomorrow.”
Beyond miracles, the cause of sainthood also requires some earthly sway; since its inception it’s been a grassroots movement on the part of a saint-to-be’s devotees. While I’ll be honest that, as a non-Catholic, I found it a little hard to believe some relatively unremarkable kid could earnestly gain this kind of widespread attention, Liesegang says that “without a genuine popular movement, [Acutis’ cause] wouldn’t have gone anywhere, so I will give credit that there are a number of people genuinely devoted to him.”
But how effective that devotion can be in the cause of sainthood has always been complicated by class, geography, and race. The Guardian notes that the documentation of scans and tests required for medical miracles can put causes without financial or technological access at a disadvantage. The Guardian also points out that the causes of several would-be saints of color have moved far slower than Acutis’. Courtney Mares, author of a book about Acutis and a correspondent for the Catholic News Agency, told Wired, “It is remarkable that Carlo Acutis will be canonized so close to the date that he was born. For context, of the 912 saints canonized by Pope Francis, the next most recent birth date was in 1926.”
Acutis was born in London and grew up in Milan. He came from what the AP calls a “wealthy family;” his father worked in banking and finance, and his mother worked in publishing. While Acutis obviously didn’t just buy his way into sainthood given the rigors of the process, an access to resources and his geographic location surely didn’t hurt.
Since the formalization of the sainthood process, Liesegang says that “class has definitely played more of a part. (Race, sadly, has always played a part.) A degree of cynicism is warranted, but there is the less nefarious reality at work, too, that the investigation process can be time-consuming and costly, and it’s certainly easier to do that work if someone pushing the cause is willing to pay.”
“There’s always been a need for people to work, push, and hustle to get someone canonized,” Liesegang continues. “Money is the same cheat code here that it is in most parts of society. (Starting in the late medieval period, you see a lot of saints whose biographies basically read ‘came from a wealthy family, entered a convent, and died.’ I’m not questioning the lives of any of those people, but it’s not too hard to see why they got the recognition.) Folks from more modest backgrounds still get in, of course, but it usually requires either overwhelming acclaim, more time, or both.”
Ultimately, Liesegang says, “Acutis has a leg up, but only in getting the ball rolling. All the money in the world can’t make people love you (just ask Elon Musk).”
Does God hate games?
Part of Acutis’ appeal comes from how current he is–or, at least “current” by the Church’s slow-moving standards. As Father Carlos Acácio Gonçalves Ferreira, rector of Acutis’ shrine in Assisi, told Wired, “It’s a beautiful thing that for the first time in history you can see a saint dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt.”
His gaming habits are part of that modern appeal. On the one hand, the games he played are so standard as to seem almost counter-intuitive to the idea that he’s remarkable; on the other, that he set such rigorous limits on himself is pretty rare for a teen, or for anyone who plays games. A book about his life claims he was concerned by how riled up his friends got while gaming; his mother says he limited his gaming time out of fear of addiction and the “dangers of the internet.”
While a saint who played video games might give a young Catholic kid ammo to argue for a console or some V-bucks, it could just as easily be used by a parent to keep their kid away from games–if a saint knew he barely stood a chance against them, what hope does your average kid have? Acutis’ relationship to games also made me wonder what role they could have played in his sainthood beyond the novelty of “Catholic saint” and “video games” in the same headline. Is he a saint despite games or because he overcame them in some way, or could they have added something to his spiritual life?
Liesegang, as a game designer, acknowledged his own bias here before saying, “I don’t know that there’s anything particularly remarkable about him being a gamer per se, other than it being a reminder that God can be and is present everywhere. The Jesuit principle ‘finding God in all things’ means that anything which does not directly injure your relationship with God is in fact something that can support and nurture it. So we find God in music, in literature, in theater, in films, in science, in exploration, and, yes, in video games.”
Liesegang praises games for their ability to “get the player to feel like a part of something bigger, to think about moral choices both individual and systemic, to feel a range of emotions, to connect with others. All of these things are potentially part of a vision of humanity that I think is in line with God’s.”
“But we also see that [games] have the potential to make people less developed in their humanity: isolated, cruel, cold. That’s apparently what Acutis saw in some of his friends and why he chose to moderate his gaming. I wish more people had that level of discernment, to say ‘oh, I don’t like how this is affecting me, even if it is flooding me with dopamine.’”
Liesegang tells me a story from his days as a game designer: “I remember sitting in a meeting once when I still worked in games where a tech artist was showing off a new system he had developed for having bodies explode in the game. I’m enough of a programmer to appreciate what he had done at the craft level, but I just felt very uneasy. I’m not a prude, but it started to make me think, is this what I want my name on? A long road from there to being a Jesuit, but those little tugs at your soul do mean something.”
At the same time, Liesegang notes, “Go into any Catholic church and you will find a prominent central display of the body of an executed man, sometimes still alive and writhing in agony.”
I’d ultimately agree with Liesegang’s feeling that if God can be found everywhere, that includes in video games. It’s an understanding rooted in Jesuit theology; while we don’t know if Acutis shared it, he did attend a Jesuit school in Milan. (For what it’s worth, I worked briefly with the Jesuits as a prison chaplain during my time in divinity school.) But whatever Acutis’ specific beliefs, Liesegang’s view shines new light on the attention paid to his gaming habits. Rather than being a headline-making incongruity or a cudgel parents might use to keep their kids away from games, they could be seen as a holistic part of his faith, just as much as his religious devotion or Catholicism-focused websites.
“God is glorified by more than just attending Mass and praying rosaries,” Liesegang says. “God is glorified when I work for social justice, when I learn about other cultures, when I solve a new programming problem, when I tend our community garden, when I wash dishes with my brother Jesuits. Whatever makes you more human also makes you closer to God.”
Household saints
Beyond being careful with your gaming time, what is the positive example Acutis as a saint might uniquely be able to offer? What can a 15-year-old, even one who might now have special sway in heaven, really teach people about how to live alongside the horrors of the modern internet, or within the culture wars that exploded in gaming after his death? He at least lived in our context, unlike other saints, but in our current era of streamers and Instagram, does he really deserve the moniker of “God’s influencer?”
Liesegang agrees with me that there’s something a bit forced in the whole “God’s influencer” line, saying, “The Church moves too slowly to ever be hip, so there will always be a bit of [that] ‘hello fellow kids’ energy.” But, he says, “there is also genuine religiosity among youth, so finding ways to tap into that is good.”
Acutis’ example to youth might be especially valuable these days, as institutions both secular and religious fail them. Youth are leaving the Church while adult converts like J.D. Vance and the “Dimes Square” scene enter it; there might be something cringe about the “influencer” of it all, but it’s an earnest, charity-focused cringe, instead of a reactionary, Right-leaning one. If Acutis shows young people a positive way to live their values within the Church if they’re seeking that connection, I think that’s ultimately a good thing.
Liesegang says, “We use ‘saint’ in casual conversation to say that someone is perfect, that their lives are fully exemplary, and that they are somehow otherworldly. There is this connotation that they are somehow specially touched by God from the beginning, given a special grace that the rest of us don’t have… Sometimes, even within the Church, we use ‘saints and sinners’ as a kind of dialectic, implying that these are two separate groups. But every saint was also a sinner. We should never forget that. These are not perfected people rising out of humanity, but heroes from within, who did the work and struggled and failed and kept going.”
I’ll admit that, despite my education in theology, Acutis’ cause is the first time I’ve been inspired to learn more about how sainthood works, in an effort to understand why him instead of people I’d personally imagine more deserving. (Out of respect for all of your time, I’ve cut how frequently I demanded Liesegang explain why Acutis but not Dorothy Day, whom he reminded me didn’t want to be called a saint.) And talking to someone on the “inside” of the Church showed me that, even if there is something a bit eye-rolling about a lot of this, Acutis can also remind people of the sanctity of the everyday, where a religious life can live alongside a conscious approach to secular hobbies like video games.
And while the “saints” and “miracles” of it all might still feel alienating, Liesegang offered his personal interpretation of all that, saying he doesn’t see miracles as “God waving a magic wand to give us something we want. For me, it goes back to the core revelation of Christianity, that God is love. Not a metaphor, not a simile, not poetic language, but literally that the least wrong way to think of the Mystery That Underlies Reality is to think of it as love… When we say that humans are made in the image of God, that’s what I think it means — it’s our capacity to love that makes us like God. We don’t have [God’s] same power to remake reality, but in small ways, when we choose to not give in to the basest firings of our neurons driven by our selfish genes, when we allow that deepest part of us to operate as it should, when we love, those are miracles. And that’s an encouraging thought, because it means it’s happening all the time, all around us.”
Clarification, 4/14, 11:50am--Edited the wording of how the Church investigates miracles to be more clear that doubts specifically related to miracles would not stop the process.
