Pope proclaims ten new saints who embodied holiness in everyday life
Pope Francis created ten new saintsyesterday,rallyingfrom knee pain that has forced him to use a wheelchair to preside over the first canonisation ceremony at the Vatican in more than two years.
Francis stood for a long period at the start of the ceremony to greet priests celebrating the Mass, and hobbled on to the altar to proclaim the six men and four women saints.
They include a Dutch priestjournalist who was killed by the Nazis, a lay Indian convert who was killed for his faith, and half-a-dozen French and Italian priests and nuns who founded religious orders.
Francis told the crowd of an estimated 45,000 in St Peter’s Square that the ten embodied holiness in everyday life, and said the church needs to embrace this idea rather than an unattainable ideal of personal achievement. “Holiness does not consist of a few heroic gestures, but of many small acts of daily love,” he said.
Francis has been complaining of strained ligaments in his right knee for months and has recently been seen using a wheelchair at public audiences.
Yesterday’s ceremony suggested Pope Francis is taking it as easy as possible to let the ligaments heal before an intense period of travel starting in July, when is due to visit
Congo and South Sudan, and Canada.
It was the first canonisation Mass at the Vatican since before the coronavirus pandemic and, aside from Easter celebrations last month, it drew one of the biggest crowds in St Peter’s Square in recent times.
The Italian president, Dutch foreign minister, French interior minister and the minister for minorities of India were among those packed in the sunny piazza, which was adorned with Dutch flowers in honour of the Rev Titus Brandsma, who was killed at the Dachau concentration camp in 1942.
In the run-up to the canonisation, a group of Dutch and
German journalists formally proposed that Rev Brandsma become a co-patron saint of journalists, alongside St Francis de Sales, given his work to combat propaganda and fake news during the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe.
According to an open letter sent to Pope Francis this month, the journalists noted thatrevbrandsmasuccessfully argued for a ban on printing Nazi propaganda in Catholic newspapers.
There has been no immediate response from the Pope.
The new saints also include the 18th century Indian convert Lazarus, known also as Devashayam, who mixed with India’s lower castes and was considered treasonous by India’s royal palace, which ordered him arrested and executed in 1752.
Also canonised were three priests, and Charles de Foucauld, a French missionary who, after rediscovering his faith as a young man, decided to live among the Tuareg peoples in the Algerian Sahara and was killed in 1916.
The four nuns canonised are Marie Rivier, who overcame a sickly childhood in France to become a nun and found a religious order; Maria Francesca di Gesu Rubatto, Maria di Gesu Santocanale and Domenica Mantovani, all Italian nuns who founded religious orders.