Seven More Saints

 This morning Pope Benedict canonized seven saint.

On of those was Mother Marianne Cope who opened and operated some of the first general hospitals in the United States, such as St. Elizabeth Hospital in Utica, New York, in 1866 and St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, New York, in 1869. Both are still open today.

Before Mother Marianne, hospitals were typically filthy and staffed with unknowledgeable people and were filthy. Many people simply went there to die. Mother Marianne began to change all that by instituting simple actions like hand washing that stopped diseases from spreading.She also welcomed patients regardless of race, creed or economic standing, decades before desegregated hospitals. She was harshly criticized for treating alcoholics. She treated their problem, which was seen by many experts as a moral failing unworthy of help, as a disease.

In 1883 she went to Hawaii in 1883 and established the first general hospital on Maui. At the leper colony of Molokai, St. Damien DeVeuster was dying from Hansen's disease when Mother Marianne's arrived. After his death she took over his facility that cared for men and boys and established a separate enterprise to treat girls and women.

Mother Marianne died on August 9, 1918, at the age of 80. Most amazingly, to this day none of the Franciscan sisters have ever contracted Hansen's disease.

One of the steps to being named a saint is for a certifiable miracle to take place through the intercession of the named saint. One miracle is needed for beatification and a second for canonization.

Jake Finkbonner was a boy in Washington who was near death for months with a flesh eating bacteria, but made a miraculous recovery that the Vatican credited to Tekakwitha.

Finkbonner cut his lip during a basketball game. Two days later he was in the hospital with a strep bacteria infection that had spread across his face, head and chest as it had gotten in through the skin and caused a severe infection. The odds of survival for people with the bacteria is about 50-50.

The family started praying to Tekakwitha, who converted to Christianity when she was 18 and became a fervent follower. Her face was scarred by smallpox as a child, but it is claimed that the scars disappeared after she died in 1680 at the age of 24. She is the first American Indian named a saint.

One of the biggest crowds today seemed to be for St. Pedro Calungsod from the Philippines. St. Vitores and St. Calungsod were martyred as the spread the faith. A year after their martyrdom , a process for beatification was initiated but only for San Vitores. Political and religious turmoil, however, delayed and halted the process. When Hagåtña was preparing for its 20th anniversary as a diocese in 1981, the 1673 beatification cause of Padre Diego Luís de San Vitores was rediscovered in old manuscripts and revived until San Vitores was finally canonized in 2000. The process brought attention to Calungsod who is now a named saint as well.

The other new saints are: Jacques Berthieu, a 19th century French Jesuit who was killed by rebels in Madagascar, where he had worked as a missionary; Giovanni Battista Piamarta, an Italian who founded a religious order in 1900 and established a Catholic printing and publishing house in his native Brescia; Carmen Salles Y Barangueras, a Spanish nun who founded a religious order to educate children in 1892; and Anna Schaeffer, a 19th century German lay woman who became a model for the sick and suffering after she fell into a boiler and badly burned her legs. The wounds never healed, causing her constant pain.

If you look closely at the crowd present here for the canonization, you might be able to spot our liturgist, David Batter, who is in Rome and attended the ceremony.