St Marianne died in 1918 of kidney and heart disease at age 80. She dedicated 30 years of her life, from 1888 to 1918, helping Hawaiian-born patients suffering with Hansen's disease (leprosy) who were exiled to the Kalaupapa peninsula on the Hawaiian Island of Molokai.

The canonisation ceremony included the presentation of "relics" to Benedict.

Sharon Smith carried one of the bone fragments exhumed from Cope's original grave site in 2005 at Kalaupapa's Bishop Home.

Smith had been wasting away with pancreatitis in 2005 in a Syracuse, N.Y., hospital founded by Cope. A stranger named Sister Michaeleen Cabral pinned a packet of soil from Cope's Kalaupapa grave to Smith's hospital gown and began praying for a miracle.

Smith eventually recovered, and last year the Vatican declared it the second miracle needed to elevate Cope to sainthood.

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Source

• Vancouver Courier
• Star Advertiser
• Image: CNN

Among the new saints, two come from the United States, Blessed Marianne Cope of Molokai and Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha.

Mother Marianne (Barbara Koob, 1838-1918) was born in Germany and grew up in Utica, New York. She joined the Sisters of Saint Francis in Syracuse in 1862 and became a leader at St. Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse in 1869.

She led a group of Sisters from New York to the Hawaiian Islands in 1883 to establish a system of nursing care for leprosy patients. She never returned to New York, and ministered on Molokai in a place called Kalaupapa.

Blessed Kateri, daughter of a Christian Algonquin mother and a Mohawk father in upstate New York, becomes the first Native American to be canonized. She was baptized by a Jesuit missionary in 1676 when she was 20; she died in Canada four years later.

The other saints are Jesuit priest Jacques Berthieu who was born in Polminhac, France, and martyred on June 8, 1896, in Ambiatibe, Madagascar.

Pedro Calungsod, a lay catechist born in Cebu, in the Philippines, was martyred on April 2, 1672, in Guam.

Father Giovanni Battista Piamarta, Italian priest and founder of the Congregation of the Holy Family of Nazareth for men and the Humble Servants of the Lord for women. He died in 1913.

Carmen Salles y Barangueras, Spanish founder of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. She worked with disadvantaged girls and prostitutes and saw that early education was essential for helping young women. She died in 1911.

Anna Schaffer, a lay German woman who wanted to be a missionary, but could not because of a succession of physical accidents and diseases. She accepted her infirmity as a way of sanctification. Her grave has been a pilgrimage site since her death in 1925.

At least 5,000 Filipino pilgrims are expected to attend the canonization rites for Pedro Calungsod, the news site Interaksyon reported. The pilgrims will be led by some 200 priests, cardinals, bishops, and archbishops.

Calungsod is only the second Filipino to be declared a saint. The first was San Lorenzo Ruiz of Manila.

In the United States, bus loads of religious pilgrims left Syracuse on Monday, bound for flights to Rome for Sunday's canonization of Marianne Cope.

Meanwhile, the head of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints said saints are "indispensable protagonists" of the New Evangelization, which is the focus of the ongoing synod in Rome.

"The saints evangelize by their virtuous lives," said Cardinal Angelo Amato. "They incarnate the evangelical beatitudes. They are the mirror to fidelity to Christ," he was quoted as saying by the Catholic News Agency.

Sources

• CNS/The Valley Catholic
• Catholic News Service
• Interaksyon
• AP/Contra Costa Times
• 9WSR
• Image: Orbis Catholicus