What an interesting Pope this Karol Wojtyla fellow is turning out to be. He has beatified 1,340 people and made 464 saints. That's an awful lot of superior saints swanking around in heaven, getting the best restaurant tables and flying first class, writes Kevin Myers.
I know we're supposed to be equal in heaven, but frankly I don't believe it. What's the point in being canonised on earth unless you can throw your weight around in the hereafter? St Teresa of Avila seems to have hit on the most congenial form of sainthood yet discovered. There she was, knees clasped tightly together, praying alone, when she was visited by an angel bearing a spear. The angel stuck the spear through the pit of her stomach, and her body was infused with an amazing sensation that lay somewhere between agony and ecstasy. As the angel continued to penetrate her, she felt her innards convulse with a strange hot fire, so pleasurable that she swooned.
Yes, I think I know what that is. I just didn't know they were handing out sainthoods for it, and I'm only sorry I didn't find out sooner. Ah well, that's the way of these things: you only hear about these special supermarket offers the day after they've finished. So Teresa's certainly seems to be the kind of sainthood for me - much better than St Sebastian's. After all, he got similar treatment to Teresa, but didn't enjoy it one bit. Which is perhaps why there is no religious order named after him, though there is one named after her. I bet morning prayers are a riot in that convent. I wonder: do they let people watch?
So, that's the truth about sainthood: it is delivered for all sorts of reasons. But there can hardly be a saint to match Karl, last Emperor of the Hapsburg empire, whom the Pope beatified last Sunday. Emperor Karl I was the architect of the battle of Caporetto in October 1917. He was thus the inspiration for Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which contains the definitive literary account of a military disaster. It was also a landmark in the career of one Erwin Rommel, who took the surrender of an entire battalion of 1,500 Italians, so to speak, single-handedly. St Teresa would have been very impressed.
Two reasons to remember Emperor Karl. Here's a third. Ten thousand Italians were killed, another 30,000 wounded, with 300,000 prisoners and 400,000 deserters (rather Italian figures, those). The Italian line finally held after mass executions of fleeing troops. But the route was perhaps understandable: the Austrians and Germans were using phosgene gas for the first time, which Emperor Karl later reported had been very effective.
The man who brought this horror about is now being beatified - though not for that. One justification of his beatification is that he strove so hard for peace. However, that's only partly true. After he came to power in December 1916, he certainly tried to negotiate a separate peace with the allies, but only on condition that he be allowed to keep his empire intact. (It's a pity he wasn't: the destruction of the Hapsburg empire was one of the greatest follies in European history.) So his primary motivation was his desire to be emperor, not to be a peacemaker, even seeking to create a new state of Poland and Galicia under Austrian control - and that's a rum reason to get beatified.
Emperor Karl abdicated his throne in November 1918, but retained some of the titles: Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Lodomeria, Galicia and Illyria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Kraków; Duke of Lothringia, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and Bukovina; Grand Duke of Transylvania and Margrave of Moravia, and, most presciently for a man who used poison gas on thousands, Duke of Auschwitz and Sator.
He died of flu in Madeira in 1922, and his wife Zita then started the Kaiser Karl Prayer League, though history doesn't relate whether praying did for her what it did for Teresa.
But it certainly didn't do her any harm: she died in 1989, after 67 years of widowhood, prayer (with or without the Avila effect) and ceaseless campaigning to get her husband beatified.
Of course, for a beatification to proceed, a miracle-healing has to be shown, and in 1960 one was duly found. A nun in Poland declared that Kaiser Karl had cured her varicose veins. To which I can only say, come back Lazarus. Miracles aren't what they used to be, especially since the nun was also receiving conventional medical treatment.
Now if varicose veins are a suitable locus for miraculous intervention worthy of a beatification, where does the process stop? Is a miracle cure for dandruff a reason to begin to beatify? What about acne? Or baldness? Or athlete's foot? Failure to achieve sexual gratification might also be a cause for prayer to a holy person as yet unbeatified or canonised.
However, I suspect there already exists a saint who is particularly qualified in that regard, to whom I would heartily recommend a frustrated supplicant to direct her solitary prayers.
So why has the Pope beatified a man who seems to have done so little to have deserved it and so much - 10,000 dead, gassed Italians - to disqualify him? Is it, perhaps, because Karl was once titular Grand Duke of Kraków, and His Holiness was once Archbishop and Grand Metropolitan of the same city? Or is it simply because the time has finally come for the grand old man to retire?