The saint maker

Pope John Paul II will today mark the canonisation of the controversial Padre Pio. Tracy McVeigh reports on the miracles - and the politics.

Just after dawn today, a long line of tour buses rumbled through the quiet streets of Rome.

More than 4,000 coaches from across Europe were heading for the giant car park in Vatican City where vendors of holy pictures, relics and statues and stallholders serving coffee and orange juice were waiting to greet the sleepy passengers.

By the time the first light of day reached the golden domes of the Vatican, it is estimated that up to two million people would have gathered in St Peter's Square. Another day in the saint-making business will have begun.

When Pope John Paul II leads this morning's service to mark the canonisation of Padre Pio, a Capuchin friar from an Italian peasant family who has been credited with hundreds of miracles, he does so as the most prolific creator of saints in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

He has made 457 new saints since he became Pope in 1978, more than all his predecessors combined going back some four centuries. There are a further 1,300 or so in the holy pipeline who have already been beatified - the applying of the title 'Blessed' and the first bureaucratic hurdle in the path to the heavenly elite.

There are also thousands more lobby groups working for other cases, including the continuing British push for the canonisation of Cardinal John Newman.

The Pope recently told Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, that he should tell his flock to pray to the late cardinal for a miracle - the prerequisite of canonisation and a clear sign of John Paul's personal approval.

The Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints has more than 100 staff devoted to the process of thoroughly investigating the suitability of candidates presented for canonisation. Each investigation can cost up to £500,000. At least two miracles must be accepted by a panel of doctors and scientists. Other witness statements and testimonies to the person's 'heroic virtue', devotion to God, the Church and/or martyrdom also have to be authenticated.

No one knows how many saints there are, as the Church only began counting in the 16th century and the present canonisation process dates from 1917, but the figure is thought to be in the region of 6,000. Critics claim that John Paul is playing to the populist gallery in a climate of dwindling church attendances and worldwide secularisation.

The Vatican-watcher and columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, John Allen, says the present Pope's policy of 'halo inflation' has drained 'the lustre from merely entering the roster of the blessed'. 'There are people within the Vatican who would just as soon slow down the saint-making machine, and who believe the value is being cheapened,' he said.

'But this is a Pope who wants to give witness to the suffering of twentieth-century martyrs. He wants to give the world some religious role models to which they can really relate.

'He has himself said that in an increasingly secularist world he wants to give models of holiness and, of course, to reflect popular devotion. That is why the process starts within a diocese. The Vatican doesn't get involved until all that first stage of gathering evidence has been done. And they are no pushover, they're extremely hard-nosed about bleeding statues and all that kind of thing.'

Allen said that the depth of devotion to Pio, who bore the stigmata - the bleeding wounds on his hands and feet which mirrored the wounds of Jesus on the Cross - within Italy makes him one of the most popular choices in recent years. Celebrity followers include Sophia Loren and the late Graham Greene, and his old friary at San Giovanni Rotondo has become a tourist attraction with millions of visitors every year and its own bingo hall.

If this multiplication of miracle-makers is a sign of a Pope keen to listen to his people, it is also open to whispers of playing politics, as in the 1998 canonisation of Edith Stein. The first Jewish-born woman saint of the Church since the Virgin Mary, Stein was a convert to Catholicism, a Carmelite nun killed at Auschwitz.

In a climate where the Church's compliant stance during the Holocaust was coming under scrutiny, acknowledging Stein as a martyr for the Church, when her death was not only unwitting but was because she was a Jew not a nun, was seen by some as more an act of apology to the Jewish race.

Stein's own family were sceptical. Her niece, Susanne Batzdorff, said bitterly after the 1987 beatification ceremony: 'If the thousands who came to cheer my aunt's beatification had come to protest Hitler, could not the death machine of Nazism been stopped?'

Fury has also been unleashed by the attempts of some to have the wartime Pope, Pius XII, a suspected anti-Semite, canonised.

In America there is a celebrity-backed campaign to have the New York fire department chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, canonised after he was killed while giving the last rites to a firefighter at Ground Zero on 11 September.

His own diocese refuses to back the campaign, and it has been pointed out that Judge died as a firefighters' chaplain and not as a martyr and that he was openly gay, which does not endear him to more traditional Catholics.

Pio was the subject of two scandals in his lifetime: financial improprieties at the hospital he founded and allegations of shenanigans in the confessional with his female devotees.

In 1960 an Italian monsignore, Carlo Maccari, later to become the Archbishop of Ancona, compiled a devastatingly critical 200-page report on Padre Pio after an investigation that was ordered by Pope John XXIII and the then Holy Office.

Maccari recorded a rumour that Pio had sex with penitents twice a week and there was a suggestion that he had Pio's confessional bugged. There were those who claimed that his stigmata was self-inflicted, using acid and iodine.

Some 30 years ago Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor met Pio and it was a spiritual experience which has touched him greatly. 'I thought he was an extraordinarily holy man and I'm delighted he is to become a saint. I think it's important in today's world to say to people that it is possible to be holy and that there are these people who live their lives in a spirit of prayer, and I don't think there is any question of the process being cheapened.'

Today in St Peter's Square will be Maureen and Frank O'Connor and their daughter Danielle who have travelled from their home in Motherwell, Scotland, as a gesture of thanks to the man they have always believed is a saint. Danielle, born with a rare chromosome defect which left her profoundly mentally and physically handicapped, was a year and nine months old when a doctor took out the drips and tubes which had kept her alive, wrapped her tenderly in a blanket and gave her to her parents to take home.

'I went home, gathered the other kids around me and told them that Danielle had been sent home to die,' Maureen O'Connor said. The family ran a pub and when a stranger approached Frank O'Connor and asked him if he could touch the baby with a rosary and a relic of Pio they were sceptical.

'I was angry,' says Maureen. 'I didn't want my baby to die and the last thing I wanted was God.' But Frank took the girl down to the stranger. 'When she went downstairs she had her wee hands up at her shoulder, the way little handicapped babies do, but when she came back she was glowing.'

Ten years on and Danielle continues 'to defy predictions of the medical world', according to one GP's report, and experts fully admit they have no explanation for why she is alive, never mind thriving and alert. But the O'Connors have their explanation: 'It was a miracle. A miracle beyond a miracle.'

Unlikely candidates for sainthood

Antoni Gaudí could become the world's first architect to be made a saint. The case is being taken seriously by Rome after an approach by Cardinal Ricardo María Carles, the Archbishop of Barcelona. Supporters say church authorities should use the 150th anniversary of Gaudí's birth this month to begin proceedings.

Although some of Gaudí's buildings were secular, he was a religious man who devoted most of his life to his visionary unfinished church, the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Família, which he began in the 1880s.

He dedicated the Casa Mila to the Virgin Mary. Gaudí died in 1926 after he was knocked down by a tram while crossing the road on his way to pray. He had an admirer in Pope Pius XI, who saw the Church of the Holy Family as a 'symbol of Catholic family values'.