Pope declares 10 new saints, including Dutch priest killed by Nazis

VATICAN CITY • Pope Francis yesterday declared 10 people saints of the Roman Catholic Church, including an anti-Nazi Dutch priest murdered in the Dachau concentration camp and a French hermit monk assassinated in Algeria.

The 85-year-old pope, who has been using a wheelchair due to pain in his knee and leg, was driven to the altar at the start of the ceremony attended by more than 50,000 people in St Peter's Square.

It was one of the largest gatherings there since Covid-19 restrictions were eased earlier this year.

Pope Francis limped to a chair behind the altar but stood to individually greet some participants. He read his homily seated, in a strong voice and often going off script, but walked to greet cardinals afterwards.

He read the canonisation proclamations while seated in front of the altar and 10 cheers went up in the crowd as he officially declared each of the 10 saints.

Titus Brandsma, who was a member of the Carmelite religious order and served as president of the Catholic university at Nijmegen, began speaking out against Nazi ideology even before World War II and the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940.

During the Nazi occupation, the priest spoke out against anti-Jewish laws, and urged Dutch Catholic newspapers not to print Nazi propaganda.

He was arrested in 1942 and held in Dutch jails before being taken to Dachau, near Munich, where he was subjected to biological experimentation and killed by lethal injection the same year at the age of 61. He is considered a martyr, having died because of what the Church calls "in hatred of the faith".

The other well-known new saint is Charles de Foucauld, a 19th-century French nobleman, soldier, explorer and geographer who later experienced a personal conversion and became a priest, living as a hermit among the poor Berbers in North Africa.

He published the first Tuareg-French dictionary and translated Tuareg poems into French.

De Foucauld was killed during a kidnapping attempt by Bedouin tribal raiders in Algeria in 1916.

The other eight who were proclaimed saints included Devasahayam Pillai, who was killed for converting to Christianity in 18th-century India, and Cesar de Bus, a 16th-century French priest who founded a religious order.

The others were two Italian priests, three Italian nuns and a French nun, who lived between the 16th and 20th centuries.

Miracles have been attributed to all the new saints.

"These saints favoured the spiritual and social growth of their nations and the whole human family, while sadly in the world today, distances are widening, tensions and wars are increasing," Pope Francis said after the Mass.

World leaders had to be "protagonists of peace and not of war", he added, in an apparent reference to the Ukraine war.

REUTERS