Charles De Foucauld beatified

Charles De Foucauld, a French soldier-turned-monk who lived with Muslims in north Africa, was moved one step closer to Roman Catholic sainthood yesterday.

As has become his custom, Pope Benedict did not preside at the beatification Mass in St Peter's Basilica, which was said instead by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, Portuguese head of the Vatican department on saints.

In brief remarks to the congregation at the end of the service, the Pope said De Foucauld's life was an invitation to all to aspire to "universal brotherhood".

Charles De Foucauld, who was born in 1858 and killed by bandits in Algeria in 1916, was one of three people who were beatified, the last step before sainthood in the Church.

He served as a French Army officer in Algeria in the late 19th century and prepared a mapping of oases in Morocco.

He underwent a religious conversion and joined a Trappist monastery in 1890, lived as a hermit in Palestine, and eventually settled in Algeria. A well-versed ethnologist and linguist, he translated poetry from Tuareg to French and parts of the Bible into the Berber language. His beatification has been criticised by some in Algeria because he worked as a missionary at the height of the French colonial period and is associated with France's colonial past.

Charles De Foucauld is credited with interceding with God for a miracle cure of a cancer-stricken Italian woman who prayed to him.

He was to have been beatified last May but the ceremony was postponed after the death of Pope John Paul in April.

The others beatified yesterday were Maria Pia Mastena (1881-1951) and Maria Crocifissa Curcio (1877-1957), both of whom were Italian and founded orders of nuns.