VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI has given the Roman Catholic church four new saints, including an Indian woman whose canonization is seen as a morale boost to Christians in India.
Catholics are a tiny minority in India and thousands of faithful, including an Indian delegation, turned out for Sunday's ceremony in St. Peter's Square.
The honour 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 Hindus in eastern and southern India.
Benedict's predecessor, John Paul II, had beatified Alphonsa during a pilgrimage to India in 1986.
Beatification is the last formal step before sainthood, the Church's highest honour for its faithful. 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.
Many people associate Mother Teresa, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning nun, with India. The ethnic Albanian came to India as a young woman to work with India's most desperately poor. She died in 1997 and John Paul beatified her in 2003.
