Forget breaking into the housing market or the millionaire class – millennials have officially just reached even headier heights. Specifically, heaven. The Vatican announced recently that Carlo Acutis, a London-born and Milan-raised boy who died from leukemia in 2006 aged just 15, now qualifies for canonization – in other words, he’s ready to be declared a saint.
He’s the first millennial to ever achieve this milestone, and that’s something you may find surprising. Not because millennials aren’t particularly saintly or anything, but because well, let’s face it: picture a saint. Chances are, they’re some Ancient Roman guy who’s died thanks to too many arrows or not enough skin. Not a modern kid with a heavenly claim to fame for being good at programming.
But despite their medieval reputation, new saints are totally a thing – in fact, the current Pope has already officially recognized more than 900 of them in the past decade or so. So how does an ambitious millennial get themselves in the chorus line?
Turns out, there’s a formal process for that.
Who can be a saint?
First of all, some terminology: according to Catholic doctrine – as well as that of the Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Oriental Orthodox, and Lutheran churches – anybody who is in heaven is a saint.
That said, there’s a special group – currently running to over 10,000 people – who various churches believe deserve special recognition. The process for deciding who qualifies differs depending on what denomination you’re interested in, but in the Catholic church, it’s a three-step progression: first, you’re declared “venerable”, then “blessed”, and finally, the canonization of a capital-S “Saint”.
Now, the process hasn’t always been so formal. Back in the first millennium CE, saints were kind of chosen the same way we choose who wins Eurovision today: “In the first five centuries of the Church, the process for recognizing a saint was based on public acclaim or the vox populi, vox Dei (voice of the people, voice of God),” explains the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). “There was no formal canonical process as understood by today’s standards.”
That’s partly why the earliest saints – figures like Saint Lidwina, who supposedly survived for 37 years lacking food or sleep and shed her skin; or Saint Denis, best known for the story of him picking up his own decapitated head and walking several miles through Paris, preaching a sermon on repentance – have such bizarre backstories. All it took back then was for enough people to decide “yeah, you probably could escape from a dragon’s belly by using a cross to induce extreme reflux if you were holy enough”, and boom! You’re a saint. You didn’t need to be human to be considered a saint. You didn’t even need to actually exist.
Clearly, things needed to change – and change they did, on January 31, 993. It was then that Pope John XV kicked off the process of developing a formal canonization procedure when he made history’s first ever formally Pope-recognized saint, Saint Ulrich. From then on, things got more formal – and if you wanted to be officially recognized as a saint, you’d need the Pope’s approval.
The devil’s advocate
The next big shake-up came in 1588 – things don’t tend to move fast in the Catholic Church – with Pope Sixtus V’s establishment of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. A lot of this was basically admin, but it also set up one of the most iconic positions in the church hierarchy: the devil’s advocate.
Today, it’s a title proudly borne by some of the most annoying people on the internet, but originally, the devil’s advocate – more properly known as the Promoter of the Faith – was one of the most important people in the canonization process.
“This official was appointed to argue against a proposed canonization or a beatification; that’s the step right before canonization,” explained Boston Globe language columnist, Ben Zimmer, in an interview with NPR in 2013. “And in this position, the person was supposed to take a skeptical view about this candidate’s saintliness, questioning were these really miracles that the candidate performed?”
“You know, if you’ve read Paradise Lost, you know that the devil is very good at arguing, very persuasive,” he added. “I guess the idea then was that there should be a position advocating a negative view, even if it was unpopular, just so that something as important as sainthood can withstand any kind of skepticism.”
Indeed, it’s no coincidence the position was created when it was: by the late 16th century, people were starting to lose their medieval credulity and lean into things like logic and the scientific method. Not only that, but Catholicism was no longer the only game in town; newly emboldened Protestant sects were starting to accuse the church of illegitimacy, while local heretical movements were gaining influence across Europe among those who favored the old more mystical ways.
The devil’s advocate, then, existed to do two things. First, to remind the fringe religious groups who was in charge of religious matters – viz, the Church. Second, to convince skeptics that there was at least some kind of oversight to the process – that any formally recognized Saints had been proven to be extra-holy, and they were no longer just going off the word of some bishop’s brother’s wife’s friend’s niece that her friend totally grew a beard to repel men and should therefore be canonized.
While the role of the devil’s advocate was all but abolished in 1983, there’s still room for opposing views to be heard – and actively solicited – during the canonization process. And these days, it doesn’t have to be a church official, a Catholic, or even a Christian to present objections: famously, the staunchly atheist Christopher Hitchens was invited to (unsuccessfully) testify against the canonization of Mother Theresa in 2003, calling her “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.”
How to become a modern saint
So, if after all this, you still want to become an officially recognized Saint, what do you need to do? Well, step one is easy enough: die.
After that, you’re going to have to wait a while. “Five years must pass from the time of a candidate’s death before a cause may begin,” explains the USCCB. “This is to allow greater balance and objectivity in evaluating the case and to let the emotions of the moment dissipate.”
And we know: half a decade seems like a long time to languish in normal, non-saintly dead personhood. The good news is, if you’re well connected enough, your supporters might be able to convince the Pope to waive this waiting period, as was the case for Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul II. If not, however – well, just be thankful you didn’t die before 1983, when the minimum was fifty years after death.
Once the waiting period is up, your supporters can contact the local bishop and ask him to open up an investigation into your life. And it is thorough: “The first thing you have to do is research anything the person has written or published, and then you begin studying anything they have left behind in terms of documentation,” Reverend Gabriel O’Donnell, a postulator for the Catholic church – that is, someone responsible for presenting cases for canonization – told PBS in 2011.
“[It’s] page after page of norms,” he added, “and you have to follow each step carefully. If you miss a step the whole thing can be thrown out as invalid, and it’s happened to some causes.”
Indeed, the evidence of your life can and likely will run to thousands of pages in length, all following strict Vatican guidelines. The goal is to find proof of a life of “heroic virtue” – and the bar is pretty high. “The person has to be holy on a personal level,” Reverend James Martin told PBS, “beyond just doing, you know, great deeds, beyond just founding a religious order or being pope or something like that.”
Once the evidence is collected, it’s sent to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, in the Vatican. A group of nine theologians examines the case and votes on whether you were sufficiently heroic or martyred; if they approve, it gets passed on to the cardinals and bishops of the Dicastery for their examination and approval. Should they also agree that your life or death was holy enough to qualify, they’ll send your file on to the pope, and you’ll be declared officially Venerable or Blessed – the exact title depends on what precisely makes you especially holy.
Either way, you’re one step closer to sainthood – but the next hurdle is a hard one. You have to perform a miracle.
And “the Vatican’s bar is very high,” Martin explained. “So, the miracle, which is usually a medical miracle or a healing, must be instantaneous, right? It must be non-recurring. It must be not attributable to any other treatment, basically, and it must just be the result of praying to that one saint.”
Like the devil’s advocates of yore, there are people specifically employed to treat claims of miracles with skepticism. Any reports are reviewed by a panel of scientists and doctors tasked with finding rational explanations for the event: “The doctors and scientists basically don’t say this is a miracle or not,” Martin explained. “They say to the Vatican, ‘This is inexplicable.’”
At this point, it’s up to the pope again: if he declares that a miracle has occurred thanks to your intercession, you’re eligible for beatification. For Acutis, the soon-to-be millennial saint, beatification came in 2020, when Pope Francis declared that the recovery of a seven-year-old boy from a rare pancreatic disorder after coming into contact with a shirt of Acutis’ was officially miraculous.
But we’re not at sainthood yet, believe it or not. For that, you need a second miracle to your name, and it has to have happened after beatification. Should you pull this off – and don’t forget, you’re dead at this point, so you can’t cheat – you can finally be canonized, and formally recognized as a saint.
Get through all these steps, and you too can be a modern millennial saint, with hundreds of thousands of Catholics throwing a big party in your honor. And sure, it’s a lot more difficult than just having a pet dog or an orgasm, but hey – you gotta do what you gotta do, we suppose.
All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current.
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