VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis on Sunday declared 10 people saints of the Roman Catholic Church, including an anti-Nazi Dutch priest murdered in the Dachau concentration camp and a French hermit monk assassinated in Algeria.
The 85-year-old pope, who has been using a wheel chair due to knee and leg pain, was driven to the altar at the start of the ceremony, which was attended by more than 50,000 people in St Peter’s Square. It was the one of the largest gatherings there since the easing of COVID restrictions earlier this year.
Francis limped to a chair behind the altar but stood to individually greet some participants.
He read his homily while seated but stood during other parts of the Mass and read his homily in a strong voice, often going off script, and walked to greet cardinals afterwards.
Francis read the canonization proclamations while seated in front of the altar and 10 cheers
went up in the crowd as he officially declared each of 10 saints.
Titus Brandsma, who was a member of the Carmelite religious order and served as president of the Catholic university at Nijmegen, began speaking out against Nazi ideology even before World War Two and the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940.
During the Nazi occupation, he spoke out against anti-Jewish laws. He urged Dutch Catholic newspapers not to print Nazi propaganda.
