Pope beatifies married couple

The Pope waves to those gathered for the beatification

VATICAN CITY -- The Roman Catholic church has beatified its first married couple in 500 years for having led "ordinary lives in an extraordinary way."

Pope John Paul II carried out the ceremony in Rome's St Peter's Basilica as part of two days of "Celebration of the Family."

Italians Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi were promoted to the ranks of the "blessed" -- one formal step from sainthood -- after being deemed as a model of "Christian spirituality, (who) lived heroically through marriage and family."

The pontiff said: "Dear families, today we have a singular confirmation that the path to holiness, followed together as a couple, is possible, is beautiful, is extraordinarily fruitful and is fundamental for the good of the family, of the church and of society."

He gave special words of encouragement for those couples who experience "the drama of separation," illness or the death of a child.

The only previous married couple to have been given such status were the martyrs Aquila and Prisca, who became saints in the very early days of Christianity.

The Beltrame Quattrocchis had four children, three of whom joined the clergy.

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One of their two daughters became a nun and both sons were ordained priests -- they helped the pontiff celebrate Mass at Sunday's ceremony. The fourth child attended the service.

Born in the 1880s, the couple married in 1905 and spent their entire lives in Rome.

Newspapers quoted the sons as saying the couple decided to sleep in separate beds after 20 years of marriage, living like brother and sister for another 26 years.

Luigi, who died in 1951, was a lawyer who worked for the government and banks and who was active in several Catholic groups.

His wife, who died 14 years later, was a teacher and writer. She comforted soldiers during World War I and later studied nursing and accompanied invalids travelling to shrines in such places as Lourdes, France.

"Ours was a normal family that sought to live its relationships on a plane of high spirituality," Don Tarcisio Beltrame Quattrocchi, one of the couple's sons, said in a recent interview.

The couple initially supported dictator Benito Mussolini's regime, but later rejected fascism and opened their home to resistance fighters, sometimes lending their priest sons' vestments to help partisans escape controls by Nazi occupiers.

Detailed records of beatifications only began to be kept five centuries' ago.

Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi became the 1,273rd and the 1,274th Catholics to be beatified by the pontiff since his tenure began 23 years ago.