Pope Leo canonizes Millennial Saint Carlo Acutis
Pope Leo XIV presided over the canonization of Carlo Acutis, an Italian teenager who became the first saint of the millennium.
The recent canonization of Italy’s Bartolo Longo shows that on the road to sainthood, the devil can sometimes be in the details.
Longo, a former Satanist in the 1800s and one of seven new saints canonized this month by Pope Leo XIV, was a lawyer whose foray into the occult is said to have given his soul to the devil.
However, in a radical change of direction, he eventually returned to the Catholic faith and became an ardent supporter of Marian worship, eventually becoming known as “Madonna’s Lawyer.”
Pope Leo announced Longo’s canonization, along with six others, at a Mass in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City on October 19, marking World Mission Sunday.
“Today we have before us seven witnesses, new saints who, by the grace of God, kept the lamp of faith alight,” the pope said in his homily. “Indeed, they themselves became beacons spreading the light of Christ.”
Born in 1841, Longo was raised by devout Catholic parents at a time when the church faced backlash from Italian nationalists, as Catholic News Agency noted.
According to Catholic news agency OSV News, Longo will major in law at the University of Naples.
But his father’s death led him to seek answers in the occult, according to the Jerusalem Post. Suffering from anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts, he eventually went on a severe fast and, the story goes, bargained for his soul with the devil.
According to Vatican News, in 1865, university professor Vincenzo Pepe convinced Longo to renounce Satanism. Seven years later, Longo was inspired by a new mission: spreading the word about the rosary.
In Pompeii, still in ruins centuries after the volcanic destruction of Mount Vesuvius, Longo founded what would become the Shrine of Our Lady of the Rosary, laying the foundation for Pompeii’s later rebirth as a thriving community.
OSV News wrote, “Thanks to Longo’s efforts, he was truly able to rise from the ashes.”
Longo and his wife continued to establish a girls’ orphanage and a facility for children of prisoners in the following decades, and many more community efforts followed. Longo died in 1926.
“He loved the poor and cared for abandoned children, sons and daughters of prisoners of war and orphans,” Tommaso Caputo, Archbishop of Pompeii, told OSV News. “He spread the Holy Rosary, testified to his faith, became an instrument of charity and sowed seeds of hope in the world.”
In addition to Longo, Pope Leo elevated six other men and women to sainthood, including an Armenian archbishop who was tortured and killed for refusing to renounce his Catholicism, a Venezuelan doctor who devotedly ministered to the poor, and several nuns who spent decades caring for the downtrodden.
The seven will join two others canonized by the Pope last month. Among them is Carlo Acutis, a British-born Italian who died in 2006 at the age of 15, becoming the first Catholic saint of the millennial generation.
