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.