On Sunday, the Catholic Church officially canonized Carlo Acutis, an Italian teenager who died in 2006, making him the first recognized millennial saint. The move was criticized by secular observers as well as some Catholics who believed the process had been too hasty, or that St. Carlo Acutis had not yet met the requirements necessary for sainthood. Today, Matthew Walther—the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary magazine—discusses the tradition of child saints, starting with St. Rumwold, who is said to have died as a newborn in the seventh century. —The Editors
The child was born at what is now King’s Sutton, in Northamptonshire, to noble parents. Only three days were given to St. Rumwold, and in them he touched eternity. In a rose-filled field surrounded by servants’ tents, his high, unchildlike voice demanded baptism from a priest (or perhaps a bishop) named Widerin, asked to hear Mass, and preached a sermon in which he urged his listeners not to participate in ambushes or to mock the persons we now call “intellectually disabled.”
Finally realizing that he would soon find himself entering heaven rather early, Rumwold made arrangements for his own funeral, even predicting that the place where his bones would lie would one day be known as Buckingham. “In that same meadow where St. Rumwold was baptized,” his hagiographer tells us, “there never ceases to be the loveliest fragrance, and the grasses neither fade nor wither but remain always green and are redolent of sweet nectar.”
I found myself thinking of St. Rumwold’s legend as I read about the Church’s recent canonization of St. Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old Italian boy who died in 2006. The first saints whose feasts are recorded in the liturgical calendar were children. The Holy Innocents, whose slaughter is recorded in St. Matthew’s Gospel, were the spiritual ancestors of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of children said to have been burned, beheaded, deprived of their ears and noses, or flung down staircases in late antiquity. It is only during the Middle Ages that we see the emergence of a now more familiar type: child saints who, like Rumwold, were not martyred.
