A London-born Italian teenager, known as "God's Influencer", has been canonised by the Vatican as the first ever 'millennial saint'. 

Carlo Acutis died in 2006, aged 17, after a battle with leukaemia. Born in London to a Catholic family, Carlo expressed a strong faith at an early age, asking to receive his first communion aged seven. 

The Acutis family then moved to Milan, where Carlo attended mass and received communion daily. The Vatican describes him as "welcoming and caring towards the poorest, and he helped the homeless, the needy, and immigrants with the money he saved from his weekly allowance". 

With his first savings, Carlo purchased a sleeping bag for a homeless man he regularly saw on his way to mass. 

Carlo was a gamer and web designer, who created a website to catalogue “church-approved miracles and appearances of the Virgin Mary”.

His mother, Antonia Salzano, said her son used his computer skills “not to do things for earning money or to become famous but to spread the Gospel to help people”.

Before he died, Carlo said: "I am happy to die because I lived my life without wasting even a minute of it on anything unpleasing to God.”

Becoming canonised is a three-step process: a deceased person must become "Venerable", "Blessed", and then "Saint". Two miracles must occur, with the second taking place posthumously.

The first occurred in 2020, after a woman in Brazil claimed that praying for Acutis’ intercession cured her son of a pancreatic issue.

The second is alleged to have occurred in 2022, when a Costa Rican student fell off her bike resulting in brain injury. The girl’s mother made a pilgrimage to Acutis’ tomb in Assisi to pray for her daughter’s recovery.

The girl made significant recovery, which the Vatican has attributed to Acutis’ intercession.

Carlo’s mother has described his canonisation as “a great joy” and a “sign of hope” that holiness is possible in the modern day.