(11 Oct 09 - RV) The Church has five new Saints. A French woman who dedicated her life to care of the elderly and abandoned, a tireless Dominican preacher, a Trappist Cistercian Oblate monk and mystic, a Polish bishop and defender of the faith and a Belgian missionary who gave himself to the lepers on the margins of 19^th century society. Sunday was a day of celebration here at the Vatican, for these five people, who in Pope Benedict XVI’s own words show us that in gifting ourselves totally to Christ, in going against the trend we can reach perfection.


Thousands converged on St Peters basilica for the ceremony, from Spain, Poland, Belgium and Hawaii, the overspill filling St Peter’s Square waving their flags, holding aloft their banners. They watched closely as, Archbishop Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Angelo Amato read the names of those to be inscribed on the role of saints.


They listened intently as Pope Benedict in his homily delivered in various languages;
telling us all that although their examples are from a distant past their witness is still relevant today.


He spoke of Oblate monk Rafael Arnaiz Baron, who died aged 27 after leaving a comfortable life to follow Christ, and the French religious Mary of the Cross, engaged in assisting the elderly who today, Benedict XVI recalled, "suffer multiple poverty and loneliness, being sometimes even abandoned by their families".


But the greatest part of his homily was given to the humble figure of a Belgian missionary priest who left his home at 23, bound for the island of Molokai off the west coast of the great continent of America. An island that during the 18th was a colony of lepers. He was Damiaan Jozef de Veuster. Today he is Hawaii’s first saint.




“Not without fear and loathing – said the Pope - he made the choice to go to the island of Molokai in the service of lepers who were there, abandoned by all, so he exposed himself to the disease from which they suffered. With them he felt at home. The servant of the Word became a suffering servant, leper with the lepers, during the last four years of his life”


Pope Benedict concluded “Their perfection, in the logic of a faith sometimes humanly incomprehensible, subsides in their no longer focusing on themselves, but in choosing to go against the trends of the time living according to the Gospel”


Following mass the Pope made his way to the raised dias before St Peter’s square for the midday angelus prayer. In comments in French and English he asked for prayers to help guide the success of the ongoing Synod of Bishops for Africa and then he a very special greeting for a particular group of pilgrims all the way from the Land of the rising Sun: “I also greet the group of survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I pray that the world may never again witness such mass destruction of innocent human life”.


Then as the tapestries bearing the images of the newly proclaimed saints were unfurled in the autumn breeze to adorn the façade of the basilica, Pope Benedict took his leave:


“May these new saints accompany you with their prayers and inspire you by the example of their holy lives”