Vatican City – A French nun who provided education to pioneers on the American frontier and a Mexican bishop who fought anti-clerical policies in the 1920s were among four new saints named by the pope Sunday.
Also sainted by Pope Benedict XVI were two Italians: a nun who advocated public schooling for girls in late-17th-century Italy and a priest who was a trailblazer for education of the deaf.
“The church rejoices in the four new saints,” Benedict told a crowd of several thousand people at the ceremony in St. Peter’s Square. “May their example inspire us and their prayers obtain for us guidance and courage.”
Americans were on hand to honor Mother Theodore Guerin, one of the new saints, who established St. Mary-of-the-Woods College for women in Indiana in 1841.
Despite decades of poor health, Guerin, who was born in 1798, set out with a handful of fellow French nuns for Indiana, where they founded a simple log-cabin chapel. For years, she resisted a local bishop’s opposition to her plans to establish a local community of nuns.
“Mother Theodore overcame many challenges and persevered in the work that the Lord has called her to do,” the pope said in his homily.
Phil McCord, the American whose restored vision was judged by the Vatican to be the miracle necessary for Guerin’s sainthood, called the ceremony “overwhelming.”
McCord, a 60-year-old engineer who manages the campus of Guerin’s order, recalled how he had faced a corneal transplant after damage from cataract surgery. He entered the chapel at the college and asked Guerin for help, and his eyesight started to improve the next morning, said McCord, the son of a lay Baptist minister.
