#Carlo Acutis rushed to sainthood while others wait centuries

Last month, 41,000 Catholics flocked to the ancient Italian city of Assisi to view the body of a curly-haired teenager dressed in a tracksuit and Nike sneakers.

Carlo Acutis was just 15 when he died of leukemia in 2006. His fervent faith inspired him to create websites cataloging Catholic miracles and to minister to the homeless and hungry in his native Milan.

After his beatification this year, Acutis, dubbed “the Millennial Saint” and “the patron of the Internet,” is a single step away from canonization — one of the youngest Catholics ever, and the first member of his generation, to reach this sacred stage.

“He gives me this hope that our time is just as good as any other to be holy,” Emmanuelle Rebeix, 23, told Catholic News Agency last month.

Meanwhile, Kansas-born Emil Kapaun, who died at 35 in a brutal North Korean prisoner-of-war camp in 1951, is also regarded as worthy of sainthood — but his cause remains stuck on a complicated path since 1993, when he achieved the first step toward canonization.

A humble parish priest before he became a US Army chaplain, Kapaun’s heroic efforts to protect and minister to the troops, regardless of their faith, earned him a posthumous Medal of Honor and a place in the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes. His saintly deeds in the camp, where he underwent torture rather than betray his faith or his men, made him a role model back home. While one miracle cure has been attributed to Acutis, two miracles have been linked to Kapaun — but, unlike Acutis, the hero soldier has yet to be beatified.

So why has Acutis reached God’s gateway so quick, while Kapaun continues to trudge down an arduous road?

The answer comes down to two very human weaknesses — money and politics — explains author Joe Drape in his book “The Saint Makers” (Hachette), out Tuesday.

“Kapaun’s cause just doesn’t tick the right boxes for the Vatican,” Drape told The Post. “This is a Kansas parish priest, a military chaplain from the heartland. It’s not a huge market for anybody.” Meanwhile, “the marketing power is in this 15-year-old kid in Italy. A computer-savvy millennial saint is someone that says, ‘We are a modern church.’ ”

According to Catholic doctrine, sainthood simply means that the soul of a deceased person is with God in heaven, and everyone can aspire to that state of grace.

Since 1982, when Pope John Paul II loosened the rules of canonization, the Catholic Church’s business of saint-making has been booming. During the last three pontificates, 1,425 holy men and women have been officially recognized as saints, more than quadruple the number named in the previous four centuries. Not even the Vatican can say for sure how many saints have been named throughout the Church’s two millennia. But 1,727 of them have been canonized since 1588, when the process was regularized by Pope Sixtus V.

“The ways of holiness are many, according to the vocation of each individual,” John Paul II wrote in 2001. But there’s nothing simple about being recognized as a saint by the Church here on earth.

“Sainthood is a marketing ploy,” Drape said. “John Paul II decided he was going to use saints to spread the word about Catholicism and to promote the Church to populations that were underserved.”

Gregarious and evangelical by nature, the Polish pope was fluent in at least eight languages and loved traveling the globe. When he arrived in a new country, he liked nothing better than to canonize a deserving local hero.

He would send word over to the Vatican office that oversees the process and say, “You know, ‘I’m going to Ecuador, who do we have over there to saint?’ ” Drape said.

Pope Francis, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires, has canonized a record 898 saints since he took charge of the Holy See in 2013. As the Church’s first-ever New World pope, Francis has sought to make saints in places where the faith is looking to grow, or to defend against Protestant expansion.

“In the last few years it’s been Latin America and Asia as the new saint hot spots,” Drape said.

Despite this gusher of godliness, sainthood remains unevenly spread. Italians have a strong home-field advantage: They still make up 47 percent of the Communion of Saints. Less than 15 percent of all saints hail from outside Europe, a 2011 study found.

After 450 years of Catholic history on this continent, only three women born in the United States or in colonial America — Elizabeth Seton, Katharine Drexel, and Kateri Tekakwitha — have become saints. St. Kateri, a 17th-century Mohawk convert who lived in what is now upstate New York, had a particularly long 332-year wait before she was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.

No American-born man has yet become a saint. Only four are at the “blessed” level that Acutis has achieved — all of them added in the last three years. One, Connecticut’s Michael McGivney, was beatified just last month, 130 years after the Knights of Columbus founder died in the flu pandemic of 1890.

“There is tension between the American church and the Vatican,” Drape said. “We’re a young country in their eyes. We were still a mission territory as late as 1908.”

Kapaun’s case for sainthood goes back to 1953, when the Korean War ended and word finally reached his hometown of Pilsen, Kan., that its favorite son had died two years before at the hands of his Chinese captors. His daring battlefield rescues of wounded comrades under enemy fire had already earned him a Bronze Star and a Distinguished Service Cross.

In the prison camp, the priest had continually risked his life for his fellow prisoners — stealing food to supplement their starvation rations, sneaking through the night to administer last rites to the dying, picking lice off the living, washing their ragged clothes, tending their festering wounds, and spurring Catholics and non-Catholics alike to persevere.

“I am a Jew, but that man will always live in my heart,” said Capt. Gerald Fink, who arrived at the camp after Kapaun died — and knew him only through the tales of the awestruck men he left behind. “He represented to me saintliness in its purest form and manliness in its rarest form.”

‘He had nothing, and he was able to use what little he had in service to others.’

 – John Hotze, on saint candidate Emil Kapaun

Canonization is a painstaking, and usually lengthy, four-step process: First, a candidate must be named a Servant of God; secondly, a life of “heroic virtue” must be proved; thirdly, after a verified miracle, the candidate is beatified and referred to as “Blessed.” Finally, after another miracle is confirmed, the candidate is canonized and considered a saint.

The timeline for Kapaun’s cause is about on par with Church norms. In the modern era, the time between death and canonization has averaged 181 years, although recent popes have reduced the wait to a century or so.

Kapaun achieved the first step in 1993 when he was named a “Servant of God.” That designation, bestowed 42 years after his death, allowed his home Diocese of Wichita to open a formal investigation into his life and works.

The often lengthy investigation stage doesn’t come cheap. “The price of sainthood is about $600,000, but it can go as high as a million,” Drape said.

For the cause of a layperson like Acutis or a parish priest like Kapaun, much of that cash goes to pay a postulator, a canon lawyer hired to shepherd the case through the Vatican’s thickets.

“The postulator runs the meter, and that meter just keeps running,” Drape said. “If you think about the amount of time from death to canonization, you’ve got a lot of guys making a lot of money.”

For decades, the Catholics of central Kansas have raised money for Kapaun’s canonization bid. Two lay fellowship groups, Kapaun’s Men and the Father Kapaun Guild, hawk books, T-shirts, baseball caps, rosaries, mugs, magnets and red-white-and-blue “Kapaun for Sainthood” bumper stickers. All told, donors and the Diocese of Wichita have spent $500,000 — and counting — on Kapaun’s cause.

“It’s a very grass-roots cause,” Drape said. “It’s quarters in the box in the little church in Pilsen, it’s pancake breakfasts — anywhere they can get a nickel, basically.”

Just as important, Drape says, is the “ground game” that continues to build Kapaun’s reputation. Devotees in Kansas and in US military communities from Japan to Bosnia have established chapels, schools and memorials in his honor. The lay groups promote the priest’s story with pilgrimages and podcasts, and sponsor speaking tours for the Army veterans whose lives he touched seven decades ago.

But, despite the 8,000 pages of documents the Diocese of Wichita sent to the Vatican, the military honors for his heroics, and the medically unexplained cures of two young Kansans — a 12-year-old with a rare autoimmune disease in 2006 and a brain-injured, comatose college athlete in 2008 — Father Emil Kapaun, Servant of God, may never get the sainthood nod from Rome.

“Part of being made a saint is not only having a virtuous life that we can imitate, it’s being relatable,” Drape said. “It’s being somebody that the faithful can see themselves in.

“Kapaun was a soldier-slash-priest, and that doesn’t really scream ‘empathy and sympathy’ to Catholics outside the US,” he said. “He represents the American military” — something to resent, not a point of patriotic pride — “and nobody’s going to do America a favor.”

Meanwhile, the cause of a good-looking computer-programming teenager is possibly too irresistible for a Church eager to recruit a new generation of smartphone-addicted youths.

Acutis’ beatification ceremony on Oct. 10 drew thousands of young Catholics, who packed Assisi’s medieval streets during a 19-day period of veneration. Pope Francis joined the crowd to pray before the young man’s body in its glass-fronted tomb, which is now the focus of a round-the-clock webcam. The Diocese of Milan, the sponsor of Acutis’ sainthood cause, is currently on the hunt for a second miracle cure that will prove his saintly worth.

It seems not long before Blessed Carlo becomes a fully fledged saint. But his quick recognition won’t discourage the supporters of Kapaun, who say they are willing to wait as long as it takes.

“He was just an average guy,” John Hotze, the Wichita priest who investigated Kapaun’s life to prepare his sainthood cause, tells Drape in the book. “He had nothing, and he was able to use what little he had in service to others.

“If he becomes a saint, then there’s hope for each and every one of us to be a saint.”