Pope Benedict XVI canonizes four new saints

October 18, 2006 In the second canonization ceremony of his papacy, Pope Benedict XVI today named four new saints.

The new saints were Rosa Venerini (1656-1728), Mother Theodore Guerin (1798-1856), Filippo Smaldone (1848-1923), and Bishop Rafael Guizar Valencia (1878-1938).

Rosa Venerini helped to establish Italy's first public schools for girls.

Mother Theodore Guerin pioneered schools and religious institutions in Indiana after emigrating from France in 1840. One of the schools she founded, a girls academy, is still in existence a few miles west of Terre Haute. Now named Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, it is the oldest Catholic liberal arts college for women in the United States of America.

Italian priest Filippo Smaldone founded an order of nuns and schools for the deaf.

Bishop Rafael Guizar Valencia disguised himself to care for the wounded during the anti-clerical Mexican revolution.