On a recent, particularly cold Sunday, the traditional Latin Mass had just concluded at Star of the Sea Catholic Church on Geary Boulevard.
Alex Shortt rose from his pew, walked down the nave to the back corner of the church, and kneeled at the shrine of St. Carlo Acutis.
The 25-year-old software engineer bowed his head, his wavy brown hair flopping toward the flickering votive candles. Above him stood a statue of what looked to be a regular kid. In fact, the statue’s countenance bore a similarity to Shortt’s. They both have the same modern hairstyle, the same tech-basic formal attire (sweater, slacks, and dress shoes), the same boyish smile. If you dropped either of them in a Biblical-era film, audiences would probably accuse them of having that anachronistic “iPhone face.”
And just as Shortt certainly had a cell phone in his pocket, the figure of St. Carlo carries a laptop tucked under his arm.
Since it was installed in September and blessed by Star of the Sea’s Father Joseph Illo the following month, the statue is San Francisco’s first official shrine to the first millennial saint.
Shortt is part of a niche but zealous scene of tech bros who worship at St. Carlo’s thoroughly modern shoes.
Dubbed “the patron saint of the internet” and “God’s influencer,” Carlo Acutis was an Italian teenager known for coding websites about the Eucharistic miracles and visions of the Virgin Mary. After Acutis died of leukemia in 2006 at the age of 16, his body was laid to rest in a glass tomb in Assisi, Italy, where pilgrims can come to see him dressed in a track suit and Nikes.
In sainting a modern teenager, whose PlayStation and Pokémon cards can technically be considered second-class relics, the Vatican made a clear bid for the young and online to pick up the faith. It required a remarkably expedited canonization process: The postmortem wait list for sainthood is, on average, roughly two centuries; Acutis got it in less than a decade.
The installation of the Vatican’s most Internet-pilled son at the Inner Richmond church is the latest development in the Catholic revival among young tech workers in San Francisco — or “trad cath”-ificiation of tech, to use the internet slang for the religious and political aesthetic that trended online in the last few years, stretching from Dimes Square to the West Wing.
It was not that long ago that being openly religious could be alienating in Silicon Valley; now, organized religion supports the tech industry with an extra layer of cultural infrastructure. Garry Tan has begun hosting Bible study networking parties in his apartment. In June, executives from Google, Meta, and OpenAI discussed the future of religion and technology at the Vatican’s conference on Artificial Intelligence. Only days before St. Carlo took his place next to the confession booths at Star of the Sea, Peter Thiel kicked off his four-part lecture series on the antichrist at the Commonwealth Club.
The canonization of a millennial teenager was a controversial move in the Catholic world, but if the shrine is any indicator, it was an effective one. Several other lone young men had sat for the Latin Mass that December afternoon, including one with tattoos of the stigmata on his palms.
“The techies decided that he was going to be their saint,” said Mariella Zevallos, the director of communications and parish life at Star of the Sea. “They wanted St. Carlo here.”
One techie in particular drove the project.
Daniel Francis, the 34-year-old man behind the popular edgelord Twitter account @growing_daniel and the founder of Abel Police, a Biblically-named SaaS company that automates police paperwork, approached Star of the Sea at least two years ago about the idea for a St. Carlo shrine, Zevallos explained. With the parish on board, Francis called on his followers online to send the church funds for the shrine via Venmo.
Zevallos said the church received at least seven donations of varying amounts up to at least $1,000 from Francis’s network. In total, the shrine cost around $8,000.
Francis and his “group of techies,” as they are referred to on the parish website, also wrote the “Prayer for Intercession of Technical Problems,” which is engraved on a plaque attached to the shrine.
“If you’re in San Francisco and you’re setting up Kubernetes, come down to Star of the Sea Church with your Jira ticket to pray,” Pablo Peniche, one of those techies, posted on X when the shrine was installed in September.
The post above may sound as incomprehensible as SF’s AI billboards do to out-of-towners, but when Shortt prays at the shrine, it’s not so far off from the kind of thing he prays for.
“I’ll pray for help solving technical challenges at work, often when sitting down and when there’s a tough problem I’m stuck on,” he said.
Shortt is a former founder and Y Combinator alum, but these days he takes on contract software engineering gigs; at his last one, he kept a pamphlet about St. Carlo’s life at his work station. He visits the shrine about twice a month after Mass or when he’s in the area. Privately, Shortt prays to St. Carlo at least once a week.
Raised in a more progressive, suburban Catholic parish in Los Altos, Shortt said he turned to a more rigorous form of the religion after his startup failed and he had to make a “series of heavy choices” about how to approach the rest of his life.
Francis’s nebulous clique is full of guys like Shortt: young and educated, edgy and disillusioned, ripe for devotion to a traditional authority. Many of them are also recent converts, including Francis, who used to be a Southern Baptist.
Aditya Prathap, Shortt’s 23-year-old roommate, was raised Hindu but converted to Catholicism during college at Stanford. Prathap said he chose Catholicism after being convinced by the evidence he found in online forums and Catholic YouTube content.
Prathap now exclusively attends Star of the Sea’s Traditional Latin Mass because he believes there are “liturgical abuses” in the English Mass services.
For Prathap, the existence of St. Carlo is an important part of what he called a “new political paradigm,” one where being a tech bro and being a conservative Catholic go hand-in-hand.
“When I see Carlo holding the MacBook, I see modernity properly experienced,” Prathap said. (The laptop St. Carlo holds is not technically a MacBook; there is an anti-abortion sticker that reads “Remember the unborn Jer 1:5” over the spot where the Apple logo would be.)
“It’s a blessing that he’s here,” Shortt said, smiling at the shrine. He credits Francis for this. “Daniel’s doing some great work.”
