Bells rang out across St Peter’s Square on Sunday as Pope Leo XIV created seven new saints, including the first from Papua New Guinea, an archbishop killed during the Armenian genocide, and a Venezuelan “doctor of the poor”.
Also canonised during the solemn ceremony — held under sunny skies in the vast plaza on World Mission Day — were three nuns who devoted their lives to the poor and the sick, and former satanic priest Bartolo Longo.
The Italian lawyer, born in 1841, later returned to the Catholic faith and went on to found the Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompeii.
“Today we have before us seven witnesses — the new saints — who, with God’s grace, kept the lamp of faith burning,” Pope Leo told an audience the Vatican estimated at about 55,000 people.
“May their intercession assist us in our trials and their example inspire us in our shared vocation to holiness,” he said during his homily.
Huge portraits of the seven were unfurled from windows overlooking the square as Leo, the first US pope, emerged from St Peter’s Basilica dressed in a ceremonial white cassock and mitre, preceded by white-clad bishops and cardinals.
Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints — the Vatican department responsible for beatification and canonisation — read aloud the profiles of the seven to applause from the crowd.
With Pope Leo’s recitation of the canonisation formula, they were officially declared saints.
In his homily, Leo described the new saints as either “martyrs for their faith”, “evangelisers and missionaries”, “charismatic founders” of congregations, or “benefactors of humanity”.
The rite of canonisation was the second performed by the former Robert Prevost since he became leader of the Catholic Church on 8 May.
Last month, he proclaimed as saints the Italians Carlo Acutis — a teenager dubbed “God’s Influencer”, who spread the faith online before his death at age 15 in 2006 — and Pier Giorgio Frassati, considered a model of charity who died in 1925 aged 24.
Canonisation is the final step towards sainthood in the Catholic Church, following beatification.
Three conditions are required — most crucially that the individual has performed at least two miracles. He or she must have been deceased for at least five years and have led an exemplary Christian life.
Martyrs and Humanitarians
Along with Longo, those made saints on Sunday were Peter To Rot, a lay catechist from Papua New Guinea killed during the Japanese occupation in World War II; Armenian bishop Ignazio Choukrallah Maloyan, executed by Turkish forces in 1915; and Venezuela’s José Gregorio Hernández Cisneros, a layman who died in 1919, whom the late Pope Francis described as a “doctor close to the weakest”.
Also from Venezuela was Maria Carmen Elena Rendiles Martínez, a nun born without a left arm who overcame her disability to found the Congregation of the Servants of Jesus before her death in 1977. She becomes the South American country’s first female saint.
The Italian nuns canonised include Vincenza Maria Poloni, the 19th-century founder of Verona’s Institute of the Sisters of Mercy, which primarily cares for the sick in hospitals, and Maria Troncatti of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians.
In the 1920s, Troncatti arrived in Ecuador, where she dedicated her life to helping the indigenous population.