THE Catholic Church last night beatified Ringo Starr by mistake.
The accidental voodoo ceremony now means Yellow Submarine will form a central part of the Roman Catholic Mass and Jesuits must wear the silver jumpsuit modelled by Starr on the cover of his 1974 solo album Goodnight Vienna.
Senior Vatican officials blamed the error on a ‘bureaucratic snafu, probably caused by Windows 7’, but stressed that once you have beatified someone you can’t just take it back.
But Monsignor Alfredo Orsini stressed Ringo was not a saint yet, adding: “We still need a second miracle. The first one being, of course, that Octopus’s Garden doesn’t actually sound that bad.”
The Beatles ‘drummer’ said: “It’s great being the second holiest man alive, after Paul, and I promise that I will only use my superpowers to do good.
“I always thought John was wrong when he said we were bigger than Jesus. All I’ve ever wanted is to be the same as Jesus. Now I am and it’s ace.
“May Ringo be with you.”
The Vatican is bracing itself for a slew of applications for sainthood from former rock stars, with three quarters of ELO already looking to be canonised on the basis they sounded quite like the Beatles.
Orsini added: “We’ll assess each application on a case-by-case basis but I can already tell Supertramp not to bother. Breakfast in America my giddy arse.”
Sainthood expert Nathan Muir said: “Perhaps the second miracle could be that George was a secret kiddy fiddler and that somehow Ringo didn’t know anything about it.”
