23 Oct San Benito Parish Gets Relic of St. Carlo Acutis, the Church’s First Millennial Saint

A strand of hair from St. Carlo Acutis, the first millennial to be declared a saint, now belongs to St. Benedict Catholic Church in San Benito, per the Valley Morning Star.

The relic is kept in a gold reliquary engraved with a Latin inscription naming Acutis as the saint it came from. Father Genaro Garza III, the parish administrator, said it will stay at the church for good, not travel with him if he is reassigned. It will be kept in his office and taken out for special occasions so the public can venerate it, with the youth in mind.

Acutis was an Italian teenager who died of leukemia on Oct. 12, 2006, at 15. He taught himself computer programming, and in his last years he built a website cataloging Eucharistic miracles that the Church has recognized, which was launched days before he died. The Vatican has said he lived a life of heroic virtue, and the Church beatified him in 2020 and canonized him on Sept. 7, 2025, under Pope Leo XIV.

Sainthood generally requires miracles credited to the person’s intercession after death. In Acutis’s case, the Vatican accepted two. The first involved a boy in Brazil with a pancreatic defect that made eating difficult. The boy’s recovery was reported after prayers to Acutis. The second was a Costa Rican woman in Florence, Italy, who survived a brain hemorrhage after a bicycle fall in 2022; her mother prayed for Acutis’s help, and the Vatican recognized it in 2024.

Garza said the number of young people at the parish stood out to him when he arrived, so he formed a youth group and had them choose a patron saint. They chose Acutis. After the bishop of the Diocese of Brownsville, Daniel Flores, approved a request, Garza wrote to the Diocese of Assisi, where Acutis is entombed, and was placed on a waiting list. During a pilgrimage to Italy, he stopped by in person and found a foot-high stack of requests from parishes worldwide. Garza said approval requires a significant reason, and his was that Acutis, a teen known for his virtue, is someone teens in San Benito can relate to.

Shipping was another hurdle. Relics must be delivered in person, and Garza said he couldn’t afford another trip, so a nun he knows in San Marino, Italy, sent a religious brother to bring it. It reached the parish in late August.

The parish celebrated Oct. 11, the eve of Acutis’s feast day, mostly for the youth. Garza said many people came to learn what relics are. He explained that first-class relics are part of a saint’s body, such as hair or bone, second-class relics are items a saint used, like clothing, and third-class relics are objects that have touched a first-class relic. He gave out Acutis bracelets, pendants and prayer cards after pressing them against the hair, which made them third-class relics. Catholics don’t pray to relics, he said, but honor them. Worship is for God alone, while veneration recognizes saints as examples of holy living.