The "patron saint of the internet" — including the Sacred Heart of Acutis!

No, really, in a "you can't make this shit up."

Francis the Talking Pope has decided there should be a patron saint of the Internet, and per that link, he's got his boy.

Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia in Italy in 2006 at age 15, will be canonized during the Jubilee for Adolescents on April 25-27, according to Vatican News. The church has attributed two miracles to Acutis, who was born to Italian parents in London and was informally known as “God’s influencer.”

I remember that, at one time, the Vatican was having outsiders, allegedly at least somewhat skeptical, look at the two alleged miracles.

I guess that's out the door, and instead, the miracles are marked "Top Secret":

The church has not detailed the miracles.

I think part of the deal is that Rome feels it needs a patron saint for everything.

In that case, per Monty Python:

Who's the patron saint of sperm?

Indeed, Rome DOES feel that. And per this Guardian piece on the modern canonization process, it started with — who else? — John Paul II.

Until 1983, when Pope John Paul II attempted to modernise the process, a Cause could not even be opened until the candidate had been dead for 50 years. (He reduced the waiting period to five years, halved the number of miracles required, and did away with the office of the “devil’s advocate”, established in 1587, whose role was to raise objections to every case.)

That last part gets back to what I said above. Before JPII, these "devil's advocates" wouldn't be members of the Vatican hierarchy and could theoretically not even be Catholic.

Other changes have happened over the decades and centuries. The need for an "incorrupt body" was tossed eons ago, for example.

Essentially, like a "god of the gaps," you have "saints of the gaps" now. Their "miracles" are far fewer because of modern scientific knowledge. And, it doesn't allow for further medical and scientific advances, nor in the case of medicine, does it allow for secularly "miraculous" spontaneous remissions.

Here's Jacalyn Duffin, a historian, and a hematologist, on that:

“The truth is that sometimes things happen that have no scientific explanation. If I can’t explain it, who am I to tell the patient, who believes that she can explain it, that she is wrong?” Duffin said. “Why can’t we have miracles and not believe in God? Wonderful things happen that cannot be explained.”

Exactly.

Acutis? He even has a sacred heart, like Jesus!

This autumn, a fragment of Acutis’s pericardium, the sack that encircles the heart, toured North America.

Oy.

And, this is why Spanish Catholics mocking Aztecs for human sacrifices with bleeding hearts, and their modern successors, have no room to talk.

If a patron saint of the internet isn't enough, surely a patron saint of social media is next. Besides saints of the gaps, you get sainthood of the gaps.

Finally? To switch from systematic or dogmatic theology to exegetical theology, per divisions within religious studies and religious criticism? How can you talk about patron saints for issues not mentioned in the bible? This is kind of like originalism vs non-originalism in US constitutional studies, but cutting across fundamentalist vs non-fundamentalist modes of exegesis.