Acutis, who died in 2006 at the age of 15, was beatified in a ceremony at the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi on Oct. 10, 2020.
In a May 23 decree, Pope Francis approved a second miracle through the Italian boy’s intercession, paving the way for him to become the first millennial saint.
A 21-year-old woman from Costa Rica, Valeria Valverde, was miraculously healed through Acutis’ intercession after she was close to dying from a serious head injury sustained in a bicycle accident while studying in Florence in 2022.
After the woman underwent an emergency craniotomy to reduce intracranial pressure, the family was told that her situation was very critical and that she could die at any moment, according to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
Six days after the accident, Valverde’s mother went on a pilgrimage to Assisi to pray for the healing of her daughter at the tomb of Blessed Carlo Acutis, leaving a written note.
On that same day, Valverde began to breathe on her own and on the following day she recovered the use of her upper limbs and partly recovered her speech.
Valverde was discharged from the intensive care unit 10 days after her mother’s pilgrimage and underwent further tests that showed that the hemorrhagic right temporal cortical contusion in her brain had completely disappeared.
Contrary to medical predictions, Valverde spent only one week in physical therapy and on Sept. 2, 2022, two months after her accident, she went on a pilgrimage to Acutis’ tomb in Assisi with her mother to celebrate her complete healing.
Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency's senior Rome correspondent. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and has a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri.
