Pope overcomes pain to conduct canonization ceremony
ROME — Pope Francis proclaimed 10 new saints on Sunday, rallying from knee pain that has forced him to use a wheelchair to preside over the first canonization ceremony at the Vatican in over two years.
Francis stood for a long period at the start to greet priests concelebrating the Mass, presided over the nearly two-hour ceremony and then stood and walked for a good 15 minutes after it ended to greet dozens of cardinals and bishops.
Francis, 85, told the crowd of over 45,000 that the 10 embodied holiness in everyday life, and said the church needs to embrace this idea. “Holiness does not consist of a few heroic gestures, but of many small acts of daily love,” he said from his chair on the altar.
It was the first canonization Mass at the Vatican since before the coronavirus pandemic.
Officials from Italy, the Netherlands, France and India, as well as the faithful packed the piazza, which was adorned with Dutch flowers to honor the Rev. Titus Brandsma, a martyr saint killed at the Dachau concentration camp in 1942.
The new saints include the 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 executed in 1752.
Also canonized was Cesar de Bus, a French priest who founded the Fathers of Christian Doctrine religious order and died in 1607; Luigi Maria Palazzolo, an Italian priest who cared for orphans and died in 1886; Giustino Maria Russolillo, an Italian priest who founded a religious order dedicated to promoting religious vocations and died in 1955; and Charles de Foucauld, a French missionary who lived among the Tuareg peoples in the Algerian Sahara and was killed in 1916.
The nuns are: Marie Rivier, who overcame a sickly childhood in France to become a nun and found a religious order and died in 1838; Maria Francesca di Gesu Rubatto, an Italian nun who helped found a religious order and died in 1904 in Uruguay; and Italians Maria di Gesu Santocanale and Domenica Mantovani, who founded religious orders and died in 1923 and 1934, respectively.