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Pope prepares to canonise London-born teenager nicknamed ‘God’s influencer’
(www.theguardian.com)
His mother claims it was around the time of his funeral that he started to work miracles, and last year the late Pope Francis credited Acutis with two. The first, the Vatican said, involved the recovery of a boy in Brazil from a rare congenital disease affecting his pancreas; the second was the healing of a student in Florence with bleeding on the brain after suffering a head trauma, and whose mother had prayed at Acutis’s tomb in Assisi.
This is honestly a pretty strange situation. I dont practice the faith anymore, and havent for a long time, but IIRC I thought for someone to become a saint that they have to have had miracles occur during their lifetime. I dont understand how things occurring after his death are used as a justification, especially when they arent really directly related to him. Nor are they exemplary situations that are completely inexplicable, and could just seem miraculous due to our imperfect understanding of medical science…
The speed at which Acutis has been canonised, especially when compared with Frassati, is part of the church’s quest to attract more young people to the faith. “That’s exactly the point,” said Andrea Vreede, Vatican correspondent for NOS, the Dutch public radio and TV network. “The church wants to have a young saint who is a millennial, somebody who belongs to the modern age.”
When you pair it with the fact that they are quite literally rushing this through, when its normally a decades long investigative process, makes it seem like quite a crock. I mean it is religion after all, but even still I feel like devout Catholics would be highly skeptical of this even. People who had crazy stuff happen during their lifetime, like allegedly developing the stigmata, arent even canonized at this pace. Seems like its all just a ruse to try and draw impressionable youth into the faith
