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

Pope Francis on Sunday canonized ten new saints of the Roman Catholic Church, including a Dutch anti-Nazi priest murdered in the Dachau concentration camp and a French hermit monk murdered in Algeria.

At the age of 85 and using a wheelchair due to knee and leg pain, the pope was taken to the altar at the start of the ceremony, which was attended by more than fifty thousand people in St. Peter’s Square. It was one of the biggest agglomerations since the easing of restrictions against Covid-19 earlier this year.

Francis limped toward a chair behind the altar, but rose to greet individual participants. He read his homily seated, but stood during other parts of the Mass and performed the reading in a strong voice, often departing from the script, and then walked to greet the Vatican cardinals.

Francis read the canonization proclamations sitting in front of the altar and heard rounds of applause for each of the ten newly proclaimed saints.

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

During the Nazi occupation, he spoke out against anti-Jewish laws and asked Dutch Catholic newspapers not to publish Nazi propaganda.

He was arrested in 1942 and held in Dutch prisons before being taken to Dachau, near Munich, where he was subjected to biological experiments and killed by lethal injection the same year, aged 61. He is considered a martyr, having died for what the Church calls “hatred of the faith”.

The other known new saint is Charles de Foucauld, a 19th-century French nobleman, soldier, explorer and geographer who later underwent a 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 invaders in Algeria in 1916.

Among the other eight who were canonized on Sunday are Devasaayam Pillai, who died of 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, all having lived between the 16th and 20th centuries.

Source: CNN Brasil

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