VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday gave the Roman Catholic Church four new saints, including an Indian woman whose canonization is seen as a morale boost to Christians in India who have suffered Hindu violence.
Thousands of faithful from the homelands of the new saints, including a delegation from India, where Catholics are a tiny minority, turned out for the ceremony in St. Peter’s Square.
The honor for Sister Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception, the first Indian woman to become a saint, comes as Christians increasingly have been the object of attacks from Hindu mobs in India.
Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, had beatified Alphonsa during a pilgrimage to India in 1986. Alphonsa, a nun from southern India, was 35 when she died in 1946.
The other new saints are Gaetano Errico, a Neapolitan priest who founded a missionary order in the 19th century; Sister Maria Bernarda, born Verena Buetler in Switzerland in 1848, who worked as a nun in Ecuador and Colombia; and Narcisa de Jesus Martillo Moran, a 19th-century laywoman from Ecuador who helped the sick and the poor.
“May their examples give us encouragement, their teachings give us direction and comfort,” Benedict said in his homily.
