Sunday, October 21, 2012

Spanish woman among 7 new saints named by pope

Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday proclaimed Spain's Mother Maria del Carmen Salles y Barangueras and six other people saints of the Roman Catholic Church in a ceremony witnessed by thousands of people in St. Peter's Square.

Salles y Barangueras, who live from 1848 to 1911, founded the Conceptionists Missionaries, a teaching order.

Salles's educational work continues to bear fruit among the young through the efforts of her order, whose members, "like her, give everything they do to God," the pope said.

The other new saints are Marianne Cope (1838-1918), a Franciscan nun who cared for lepers in Hawaii; Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680), the first Native American saint from the United States; and Anna Schaeffer (1882-1925), a German laywoman who was paralyzed in an industrial accident and was devoted to the Sacred Heart.

French Jesuit Jacques Berthieu (1838-1896); secular Filipino martyr Pedro Calungsod (1654-1672); and Italian priest Giovanni Battista Piamarta (1841-1913), who founded the Congregation of the Holy Family of Nazareth, were the other new saints proclaimed by the pope.