A new documentary about Carlo Acutis, the Catholic teenager known as “God’s Influencer,” has drawn an extraordinary television audience in Italy.
Titled My Name Is Carlo, the film explores Acutis’s short but remarkable life and attracted almost 4.3 million viewers when it aired on Canale 5 on Sunday.
The broadcast captured close to 30 per cent of the overall viewing audience. According to Italian media reports, the figure climbed to about 40 per cent at the documentary’s peak.
It charts the story of Acutis, who died from leukaemia in 2006 at the age of 15 and was canonised by Pope Leo in September 2025.
Italian actor Samuele Carrino portrays Acutis in the documentary. Born in London on May 3, 1991, the future saint came from a wealthy family that later returned to Milan.
Acutis gained the nickname “God’s Influencer” because of his pioneering use of technology. Among his most significant projects was a multilingual website cataloguing Eucharistic miracles acknowledged by the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church declared him a saint after recognising two miracles attributed to his intercession.
The first was approved in 2020 and involved the healing of a child suffering from a pancreatic condition.
Carlo Acutis’s tomb at the Sanctuary of the Renunciation in Assisi, part of the Church of St Mary Major
The child’s Brazilian mother had prayed to Acutis before kissing a relic of his clothing. Soon after Mass, her son told her that he felt well again.
Subsequent medical examinations found that the boy’s pancreas had returned to normal.
The second miracle was confirmed in 2024. It concerned a Costa Rican woman who suffered a severe brain haemorrhage after falling from her bicycle in Italy. Her mother prayed at Acutis’s tomb, after which the woman was said to have made a remarkable recovery.
On the same day, despite doctors warning that she was unlikely to survive, the woman began breathing without assistance.
By the following day, she could walk on her own. Doctors examining the case later reported that the signs of the haemorrhage had vanished.
Acutis’s popularity has also made Assisi a major pilgrimage destination, with estimates suggesting that more than one million people have visited the hilltop town to see where his body rests.
His remains were exhumed in 2019 and placed in a glass tomb, where they have been displayed dressed in a tracksuit and trainers.
Acutis was the son of an Italian mother and a banker father who was half English and half Italian. Although his parents were not especially religious, he developed a deeply committed Catholic faith.
Raised in Milan, he attended Mass every day and became known for helping vulnerable people, including children targeted by bullies and those experiencing homelessness. He regularly gave homeless people food and sleeping bags.
His interest in digital communication led him to manage his local parish website and later the website of a Vatican-based academy, using both platforms to share Catholic teachings.
At 11, Acutis became fascinated by accounts of Eucharistic miracles, including stories of wine turning into blood in Croatian castles and Colombian priests using reliquaries to halt advancing tsunamis.
In the documentary, Acutis is played by Italian actor Samuele Carrino
He would then look up these tales and post them on his website, which he had designed to document miracles and stories about saints.
Antonia Salzano, his mother, said her son had a ‘special relationship’ with God from an early age, even though her family was not religious.
Aged seven, Acutis wrote: ‘My life plan is to be always close to Jesus.’
It was a commitment he would carry with him throughout his life before it was cut short by cancer of the blood in 2006.
Carlo’s diagnosis with leukaemia in October 2006 came as a horrifying shock.
The disease can take several forms but affects the blood cells in bone marrow.
Symptoms include tiredness, bruising and bleeding, repeated infections and high temperatures, per Blood Cancer UK.
The disease overwhelmingly affects young people. While it is not currently curable, it is possible to treat.
In spite of his diagnosis, Carlo reassured his parents: ‘I’m happy to die because I’ve lived my life without wasting even a minute of it doing things that wouldn’t have pleased God.’