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A Catholic Church in Belarus blessed an AI-generated image of St. Carlo Acutis, an Italian teen known as the first Millennial saint, effectively granting the image the treatment typically reserved for an authentic icon.
The ceremony reportedly occurred in St. Mary Magdalene Church in Novolukoml, Belarus, and was presided over by Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz. Clergy unveiled the depiction and blessed it as a permanent part of the church. Belarusian media reported that the image was “consecrated” during the ceremony, a particular designation that sets apart the object of the consecration exclusively for prayer and worship of God.
Multiple reports describe the blessing of the image as the first of its kind in the history of the Catholic Church — and a particularly controversial move given that Pope Leo XIV has repeatedly discouraged the use of artificial intelligence to draft homilies and engage in other clerical activities. The pope recently warned that humans must distinguish between true art created by humans, which represents the human soul, and AI artifacts.
The image created by machines shows the likeness of St. Carlo holding a laptop, representing his work in life in creating a website to document instances of Eucharistic miracles.
Archbishop Kondrusiewicz, who retired from his position at the head of the Archdiocese of Minsk-Mohilev in September 2025 after clashing with communist dictator Alexander Lukashenko, used his remarks at the event to highlight the potential of using the internet to spread the Catholic faith.
“Today we enter the world through the internet. What are we looking for there? Holiness? Far from always,” he reportedly said, according to the Russian state outlet RT.
St. Carlo Acutis is the newest canonized saint in the Catholic Church. Born in 1991, he was canonized in September 2025, alongside another Italian youth, St. Pier Giorgio Frassati, and is considered the Church’s youngest saint. Despite his background as the son of a well-to-do, but not especially religious family, Acutis rapidly embraced the faith as a child and spent much of his brief life in prayer and endeavored to use modern technology to spread Catholicism. Acutis began to build a website when he was 11 years old, in 2002, completing three years later as a way to document Eucharistic miracles — instances where the consecrated bread used in Catholic Mass begins to bleed the blood of Jesus Christ. Catholics believe that the bread and wine used in the Mass becomes the literal body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus, and on rare occasions literally bleeds or becomes flesh. Confirmed eucharistic miracles require scientific examination of the bleeding host. The saint’s website is still accessible today.
St. Carlo Acutis died in 2006 at the age of 15 after being diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukaemia. Due to his age and use of the internet, St. Carlo is considered the patron saint of the internet and the first Millennial saint.
The use of AI to create an attempted icon runs afoul of thousands of years of Catholic practice. The Church teaches that the painting, sketching, or other creation of a saint icon is a form of prayer; the artist is meant to spend the hours creating the artwork in meditation, prayer, and reflection on the lessons of the life of the saint in question. Allowing a machine to generate an original icon, rather than having a machine print copies of a human work of art, effectively allows humans to “skip” the prayer inherent in the creation of the icon.
Pope Leo has emphasized the need for spiritual leadership in the AI realm throughout his leadership of the earthly church. He dedicated his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, to the topic, warning of “the risk of dehumanization” and comparing the advance of AI to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. On AI-generated images, the pope discussed the topic in early October, warning humans to distinguish art from machine images. While the pope was not specifically addressing the creation of icons, his statement appeared to apply to all artistic creation.
“In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce,” the pope said at the time. “There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others.”
“Algorithms lack the spark of humanity,” he continued. “For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.”
Pope Leo has also warned clergy to avoid the use of AI in their official duties, such as writing homilies.
“Like all the muscles in the body, if we do not use them, if we do not move them, they die,” Pope Leo warned in February. “The brain needs to be used, so our intelligence must also be exercised a little so as not to lose this capacity.”
Pope Leo has not addressed the news from Belarus at press time, nor has the Holy See in an official capacity. The pontiff is currently recovering from surgery on his lungs, which revealed the presence of lung cancer and will require further treatment. Outside of the Vatican, however, the AI-generated image has prompted some disgust and controversy in the global Catholic community, given the spiritual purposes behind creating an icon and how commanding a computer to create one overrides them.
“Have we no shame?” asked Father Matthew P. Schneider, a Roman Catholic priest and professor of theology at Holy Apostles College & Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut, on social media. “Sacred art must always be human made. Icons, if we understand the theology behind them, even more so.”
The image of St. Carlo Acutis is far from the first religious use of AI, though it may be an unprecedented moment for the Catholic Church. As documented in the New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI by Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall, AI has increasingly begun to surface in religious practice. Among the most pronounced examples of this is the creation of an AI-generated avatar of Jesus Christ by the company Just Like Me, intended to be used as a spiritual adviser that consumers can converse with. Just Like Me CEO Chris Breed described the false Jesus as “your friend” that human users feel “accountable” to as they increase their interactions with it.
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