Can the Virtual Body Perform a Miracle?

Neo-Relics, St Carlo Acutis, and the Theology of Machinic Presence

This paper asks whether a digital, virtual entity can become a relic, becoming what can be called a neo-relic and whether this neo-relic can be expected to mediate the miraculous. Taking St Carlo Acutis (canonised in 2025 and framed as “God’s influencer”) the patron figure of digital evangelisation as its central case study, the paper examines the transition from relic-body to virtual-relic-body within a post-phenomenological framework. In traditional Catholic practice, relics operate through material continuity: bone, flesh, clothing, or objects touched and used by the saint. Yet the twenty-first century increasingly produces devotional forms in which saintly presence is re-mediated through websites, games, avatars, metaverse environments, and AI-driven interfaces. Thus, the term neo-relic emerge to name this configuration; a digital or machinic entity that does not necessarily possess material contact with the saint, but inherits the relic’s function of making an absent body present, organising devotion, and sustaining new possibilities of intercession. Rather than treating digital sainthood as a simple technological novelty, the paper situates it within a longer archaeological and theological history of animated sacred matter, from reliquaries and saintly remains to machinic and virtual bodies (see Meskell 2004 and Stiegler 2011, 2016) . The question is not whether the digital saint is “really” alive, but how interfaces come to stage presence, agency, and miraculous expectation. In this sense, the neo-relic marks a threshold where the digital body ceases merely to represent sanctity and begins to operate as a site of devotional encounter.