An Italian girl who died of cancer at the age of six and a half could soon become the Catholic Church's youngest saint.
Concluding a key stage in the process which leads eventually to canonisation, Pope Benedict XVI on Monday signed papers confirming the ''heroic virtues'' of Antonietta Meo, who was born in Rome in 1930.
The next stage in the process will be a beatification ceremony. This normally comes within a few months of the decree on heroic virtues and puts the candidate on the penultimate rung of the ladder to sainthood.
At the moment the youngest Catholic saint is another Italian, Domenico Savio, who died in 1954 just before his 15th birthday.
Meo was a cheerful girl, with short black hair, who was diagnosed with bone cancer at the age of five and as a result had to have a leg amputated.
She accepted her fate and, wearing a heavy false leg, continued to play with the other children at her kindergarten, Vatican Radio said on the basis of official documents.
During this time she wrote many prayers in the form of letters which, according to Vatican experts, reveal a ''truly extraordinary life of mystical union'' with God.
In one of the letters she wrote: ''Dear baby Jesus, you are holy, you are good. Help me, grant me your grace and give me back my leg. If you don't want to, then may your will be done''.
Meo, known to her family as Nennolina, died on July 3, 1937.
Until recently, Church authorities were cautious about proclaiming children saints. But on the basis of modern psychology, they were convinced that even small children could show ''heroic virtues'' when their thoughts and behaviour went beyond what was normal for their age.
''It is possible to speak of a human being being precocious in their sense of good and evil,'' said the head of the Vatican saints department in 1981.
