Not everyone has the patience of a saint — but Antonia Salzano’s son, Carlo, did.
With Carlo Acutis’ canonization by Pope Francis just one week away, he’s already been globally heralded as the first-ever millennial saint.
But his mother, admittedly, never shared the same concern for her spiritual life.
She recently told Fox News Digital she was “far away” from the church after being raised in a non-religious household. She attended Catholic school out of sheer convenience, and had only stepped foot inside a church on three distinct occasions — all of which were to complete sacraments that aligned with her school curriculum.
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To Antonia, it was protocol — a matriculation, even, of sorts — as her Catholic sacraments were likened to assignments.
That is, until Carlo was five years old and a beloved priest from Bologna, Italy, who had “the discernment of the spirit,” told Antonia that her young boy would grow up to be someone special.
Struck by the priest’s prediction, it marked the moment her life would change forever.
“Carlo, for me, was a savior,” Antonia told the outlet. “He was a mystic.”
The soon-to-be saint and his mother would study theology and attend daily mass together, often at the latter’s encouragement. When he later died at the age of 15, he visited Antonia in a dream, announcing he would one day be canonized following news of the first miracle attributed to his intercession.
That day would be April 27, 2025.
Four years after Carlo’s death from leukemia in 2006, Antonia would become a recipient of her son’s intercession in her own right.
“When Carlo died, I was 39 years old, and then I started to try to have other children. I said, ‘I’m still young, maybe I can try, no?’ [But] the children didn’t arrive. Then I had started on my practice to adopt a child, but in Italy, it’s very difficult… I had lost all my hopes to have children by myself,” she explained. “Once I dreamed about Carlo, he told me, ‘listen, you will become, again, a mother. Don’t worry.’ And, one month after, I became pregnant.”
After years of struggling to accept that she’d never be a mother again, her twins, Francesca and Michele, would share a due date on the anniversary of Carlo’s passing.
Born in 1991 and a product of his 1990s-2000s upbringing, Antonia told the outlet that Carlo’s mission was to evangelize using the internet.
Before technology would pique his intrigue, Carlo was a charitable child — spending his early years helping those in need in his neighborhood of Milan, where he often provided garments and food for the city’s homeless population.
“Mother Teresa used to say we don’t need to help around the world because it’s sufficient to go outside our house where we will find our Calcutta,” she said. “And Carlo found his Calcutta in Milano.”
When it dawned on Carlo that feeding a soul is as vital as feeding a stomach, the tech-savvy teenager honed his website-building skills to document Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions.
It was, as Antonia described, “the light side of the internet.”
“Sometimes we are unprepared about this impact of social media, the internet,” Antonia said. “I understood straight away that the internet had the light side of internet. And you could say that there is also the dark side. Unfortunately, especially young people, pass hours in front of these things and they lose their freedom. So, it can be very dangerous.”
Those dangers are explored in the new documentary film, “Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality,” in which Antonia offers commentary. The film, a joint effort between Castletown Media and Jim Wahlberg’s Wahl Street Productions — which premieres in tandem with Carlo’s canonization — exposes the social dilemma of social media by challenging a group of teenagers to part ways with their devices on a Catholic pilgrimage to Carlo’s tomb.
In speaking about the film, Antonia described her son as being a “sign of hope” amid the virtual landscape of our society — as public discourse surrounding Carlo’s impact has led to monikers like “God’s Influencer” and “The Patron Saint of the Internet.”
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“He [Carlo] understood there was a lack of faith. He used to say there are thousands of people going in front of a concert, in front of a football match. I don’t see them in front of the Tabernacle, where there is the house of Jesus that is really present among us,” she explained. “So he used the internet for goodness. He lived all the dangers the young people and all the people are living now. But he was able to dominate, to be free, always to maintain his freedom, not to become a slave [to it].”
Through his technological endeavors and spiritual discipline, Carlo Acutis would end up leaving his global mark, as Catholic leaders all over the world now look to him to relate to today’s younger generations.
His mother agrees, echoing the high priests’ position that Carlo is an antidote to our social media-addicted society.
“Surely Carlo is a work of God. So, the fact that God gives through Carlo all these graces is… probably, God wants to help us, our society, our young people; the parents as well, because the problem is also the parents,” she told Fox News Digital.
“Carlo is an instrument, because he lived the things we are living. He was dressed like most of the young people, the teenagers. Most of the saints of the past sometimes seem unreachable, because they are too high, too holy. Sometimes they seem very far away from us. Instead, [Carlo] came to teach us that, in the daily life, we can become holy in our routine. Thinking of God, offering our work to God with a prayer, our life becomes a continuous prayer. So the mysticism… we are all mystic because we have the Holy Trinity inside us. The only problem is that we don’t have the connection with the presence of God in us.”
Antonia asserted it’s a matter of having that desire to connect.
“Of course, at the beginning it will not be easy,” she started. “But with practice, with the constant will, if we really desire [this] in our heart, God will reward us. We have to have that desire in the soul of the people.”
Antonia, now a devoted Catholic who says the sacraments she’s made are “the supernatural means God uses to give us grace,” concluded by imploring readers to realize that we are all original works of art and have a “special project” that God has in store for each one of us — if only we’re receptive to it.
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“Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality” will have its global debut on April 21 in Washington, D.C., before airing at the Vatican on April 24, followed by a theatrical release on April 27 — the same day Carlo will be canonized in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square.