We always need more saints. We just need less cloying devotional writing about them.
Take today's news cycle dominated by the canonization of St. Carlo Acutis. A typical headline reads like this:
Pope Leo declares teen millennial, known as ‘God’s influencer’, a saint – Carlo Acutis, a digital pioneer, used his computer skills to spread Catholic teaching globally. (7 Sep 2025 | Al Jazeera)
Cute kid. Every good mother's son. If you're a tween girl, he's kinda hot. Pious, but sporty and a gamer, so he's cool with the guys too. Devoted to Jesus and his Church. Died tragically young of leukemia. Now performing miracles from heaven.
Compelling stuff, but cloyingly told. What comes through is a selective curation of what sainthood is supposed to be: character perfection, a soul unstained by the body and the world, eschewing conflict, gazing doe-eyed to heaven. I doubt Carlo himself saw saints that way during his life on Earth, or finds many like that with him now in the presence of God.
But what else is there to sainthood?
At the Mass, the pontiff also canonised Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died in 1924 but was widely recognised for his charitable work.
Notice how he's tossed in as an afterthought, below the fold. The first American Pope canonizes two new saints today in a joint ceremony. One makes headlines. The other barely makes the news, and what attention he does garner is so sanitized, you don't want to know anything more about him.
So let me tell you about St. Pier Giorgio Frassati. His Wikipedia entry identifies him as an “Italian Catholic activist.” Active in the Catholic Action movement and the St. Vincent de Paul Society, to say he was “charitable” is such an understatement that it's deceitful.
St. Pier Giorgio Frassati was an anti-fascist demonstrator who opposed Mussolini and got arrested in 1921 protesting alongside the Young Catholic Workers Congress. Dedicated to the newly emerging articulation of Catholic Social Teaching, he started a newspaper based on the social principles in Pope Leo XIII’s epoch-defining encyclical Rerum novarum, addressing the condition of the world's working class. His motto? “Charity is not enough. We need social reform.”
Sharp dresser. Mountain climber. Studied to be a mining engineer “in order to serve Christ better among the miners.” Turned down a car as a graduation present from Dad and gave the money to the poor instead of spending it on himself. Died tragically early of Polio after an aborted river-rafting trip with two buddies. Arguably he's as cool as Acutis.
So why does he get so much less attention? To be fair, that's partly due to the decades in which they lived. St. Carlo appears in color, and St. Pier in black-and-white. One is simply more “now” than the other.
But it's hard to escape the impression that St. Carlo is easier to squeeze into a box of saccharine piety than St. Pier, a box that the Church has spent centuries trying to climb out of and that its most Traditionalist adherents as well as its cottage industry of devotional publishing houses are desperately trying to stuff it back into.
The point here isn't one is more of a saint than the other, or to pit these two saints against one another. The point is that there's more to sainthood, that both young men are icons of the soul perfected in the Image of Christ, and that to focus on one over the other wilfully fails to see that image in its fullness.
Sorry pious Catholic pop culture: at the wedding feast of the Lamb, Carlo’s sitting at the grown-up table. I hope Pier is buying him his first beer.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Catholic Edition of the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. https://www.friendshippress.org/pages/about-the-nrsvue
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