Pope beatifies nun who inspired Mel Gibson

The Pope, looking tired and speaking with difficulty, yesterday ploughed into fresh controversy by announcing two startling beatifications.

The Pope, looking tired and speaking with difficulty, yesterday ploughed into fresh controversy by announcing two startling beatifications.

Among the five people John Paul II set on the road to canonisation were the last Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a sickly, uneducated German nun whose gory visions inspired Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

Emperor Charles I's defeat in First World War saw the end of the Habsburg empire. He died at the age of 35 in 1922 on the island of Madeira. An Austrian organisation called The Prayer League, set up in 1949 to lobby for his canonisation, maintains that Charles was a virtuous monarch of unshakeable faith, dedicated to serving his people and always seeking the common good. "He was a great man," said Elizabeth Kovacs, an Austrian academic who has been involved in the Vatican's research into the monarch's life.

But he also has plenty of detractors, who claim he was a drunk and a warmonger who had little idea of what was going on around him and who, after the break-up of his empire at the conclusion of the First World War, did everything he could to cling to power, twice trying to obtain the crown of Hungary.

His march to sainthood has not been impeded by his dwindling support in Austria, where membership of the Prayer League has shrunk from as high as 30,000 in the 1960s to a tenth of that number today. On his side is the backing of the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the conservative churchman who is seen as a protégé of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and widely seen as the most powerful man in the Vatican.

The other remarkable beatification yesterday was that of Anna Katharina Emmerick, a German nun who died in 1824 and who lived for years on nothing but communion wafers and water. She bore the stigmata, the wounds of Jesus, and her visions, including scenes in which the Devil incited Jews to demand Christ's crucifixion, inspired Mel Gibson's hit film.