Pope Leo XIV canonized Venezuela's beloved "doctor of the poor" Sunday before 70,000 people at the Vatican, offering the South American nation its first saint and a reason to celebrate during its yearslong economic crisis and new tensions with the US. José Gregorio Hernández, revered by millions for his dedication to poor people, was declared a saint alongside the founder of a Venezuelan religious order, Mother Carmen Rendiles Martínez, at a Mass in St. Peter's Square that Leo called a "great celebration of holiness," the AP reports.
Thousands of jubilant Venezuelans filled the square and draped their nation's flag over police barricades, adding splashes of red, blue and yellow that perfectly matched the uniforms of the attending Swiss Guards. Thousands more who couldn't travel to Rome gathered overnight in the Caracas plaza outside the Nuestra Señora de La Candelaria church, where a 26-foot statue of Hernández stands, and watched the Mass from Rome on a giant screen. "It's good news after so much sadness," said Ana Sanabria, 71, as she watched fireworks in Caracas. Earlier this month, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize.
In all, seven people were canonized in a ceremony that Pope Francis put in motion just before he died. In fact, Francis approved Hernández's canonization from his hospital room on Feb. 24, agreeing to bypass the Vatican's typical miracle confirmation process to pronounce him a saint based on the "widespread veneration of the 'doctor-saint' among the faithful," the Vatican said. In Venezuela, Hernández's portrait appears in street art around Caracas, in hospitals and on home altars. As a doctor in Caracas during the late 1800s and early 1900s, he refused to take money from poor people for his services and often gave them money for medicine. He was killed in a road accident in 1919 while crossing a street after picking up medicine at a pharmacy to bring to a poor elderly woman.
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Other new saints: The Mass also gave Papua New Guinea its first saint—Peter To Rot, a layman killed in prison in 1945 for standing up for monogamous marriage at a time when polygamy was practiced. Others canonized were Archbishop Ignazio Choukrallah Maloyan, an Armenian Catholic who was killed for refusing to renounce his faith during what the Vatican has said was the Ottoman era genocide of Armenians; Sister Vincenza Maria Poloni, a 19th-century founder of a religious order; Sister Maria Troncatti, an Italian missionary in Ecuador; and Bartolo Longo, who like Hernández was canonized based on widespread veneration among the faithful, not a purported miraculous healing. In his homily, Leo held up all seven new saints as models for today's Catholics. "May their intercession assist us in our trials and their example inspire us in our shared vocation to holiness," he said.
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