If Carlo Acutis’ canonisation seems a little opportunistic, how to account for the thousands who thronged a sunny St Peter’s Square last Sunday?

The official website now spells out “San Carlo Acutis” on the welcome page and there’s a halo on that familiar portrait. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were both cued to appear at the very moment Pope Leo declared Sancti esse decernimus et definimus on Sunday morning. It’s amazing what the kids can do online.

Carlo is an old person’s idea of a young per- son’s saint. You only need to be a few years younger than him – he would have been 34 – for the photographs to look rather dated, and for the website built with his vaunted computer skills to look endearingly clunky. His experience of the digital world isn’t all that relatable to a smartphone generation, and his hagiography is mostly mainstream piety and good works. If he didn’t do his homework, it’s because he was too busy helping the poor.

Put it alongside the well-funded haste of his Cause and Carlo’s cult looks like the initiative of an opportunistic hierarchy, or at least an over- enthusiastic Pope Francis. How, then, to account for the giddy thousands in a sunny St Peter’s Square for the canonisation Mass?

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