His worshippers are willing to pay top dollar for his hair, which they believe has healing powers. They can play with toy action figures made in his likeness. They gather from around the world to see his wax-encased body decked out in sneakers, jeans and a sweatshirt, but Carlo Acutis’ adoring flock is going to have to wait for the late teen to officially become a saint in the wake of Pope Francis’ death.

Acutis’ canonization was scheduled for Sunday in St. Peter’s Square on the occasion of the first-ever Jubilee of Teenagers dedicated to young people, who will have a unique experience of “faith, spiritual growth, and intercultural exchange,” according to Vatican officials. 

But the long-awaited canonization has been indefinitely postponed.

“Following the death of the Supreme Pontiff, the Holy See Press Office announced that the Eucharistic Celebration and Rite of Canonization of Blessed Carlo Acutis, scheduled for April 27, 2025, the Second Sunday of Easter or of Divine Mercy, on the occasion of the Jubilee for Adolescents, is suspended,” The Holy See said in a statement.  

When he is finally canonized, Acutis will become the first Catholic saint born between 1981 and 1996.

Acutis’s road to sainthood started more than a dozen years ago after a campaign was launched by a group of priests, family and friends. 

Playfully known as “God’s influencer” for using the internet to evangelize and for a website he created cataloging Eucharistic miracles, or events where the consecrated bread and wine are believed to transform into the actual body and blood of Christ, would be the first “Millennial Saint.” 

The British-born Acutis, who died on Oct. 12, 2006, from leukemia, was credited with two miracles by Pope Francis, a necessary hurdle to achieving sainthood. 

First, in 2013, the mother of Mattheus Vianna, a Brazilian boy, obtained a relic of Acutis from his mother. She prayed for Acutis to heal her son of his rare pancreatic condition. At 4, Mattheus was only 20 pounds and could barely eat and vomited constantly. A few days later, he was cured and on Oct. 13, he was asking for rice and beans, French fries and steak. 

And then in 2022, a 21-year-old Costa Rican woman named Valeria Valverde suffered a terrible head injury in a bike accident. Doctors worried she wouldn’t recover. Her mother prayed for the Millennial Saint to intercede. By the time she got back to the hospital, her daughter’s brain hemorrhage had disappeared. 

Although he’s destined for sainthood, Acutis’s mother, Antonia Salzano, remembers a normal boy who loved sports and playing video games, although for only an ascetic hour a week, which has also earned him the moniker the first “Gamer Saint.”

“He loved (soccer), he loved basketball, he liked animals, he liked to play. A lot of friends loved him very much because he was always joking,” she said in an interview. 

But that same boy would also spend his money on sleeping bags for the poor and had a lifelong dream to be a saint, a dream now temporarily deferred. 

“This is Carlo’s secret,” she said. “And this is possible for everybody because Carlo had a simple spirituality. He didn’t have the stigmata, or apparitions, or (experienced) levitation. He had a simple childhood.”