Pope announces three new saints

Posted on 10/05/2003 at 18:53:49  |  Reply  |  Report Abuse |  0

The three new saints, an Italian, a German and an Austrian, were instrumental in the evangelization of Africa and China.

The most famous was Daniele Comboni, who worked as a missionary in Sudan before founding the order of priests that carries his name and now works in many countries around the world.

Comboni, who abhorred the slave trade and whose motto to help Africans was ``Africa or death,'' died in Khartoum in 1881 at the age of 50. There are about 4,000 Comboni missionaries around the world today.

The Church credits Comboni with a miracle cure of a Muslim Sudanese woman whose hemorrhage stopped after a nun put a picture of Comboni under her pillow.

Another new saint is Arnold Janssen, who was born in the lower Rhineland in 1837.

When anti-Catholic laws in Germany led to the expulsion of many priests and bishops, he moved to the Netherlands and began the Divine Word Missionaries. They now work in 63 countries.

The third is Josef Freinademetz, born in 1852 in the South Tyrol, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire which was given to Italy after World War One.

He joined the Divine Word Missionaries and worked most of his life in China, where he died in 1907. Catholics in China prayed to him recently to protect them from the SARS virus.