Vatican City - Pope Benedict XVI named four saints on Sunday, among them two nuns who pioneered schools for women, including schools in the wilds of 19th-century frontier Indiana.
The canonization ceremony, on St. Peter’s Square, was for the second round of saints named by Benedict since he became pope in April 2005.
Hundreds of pilgrims from Indiana attended the canonization of Mother Théodore Guérin, born Anne-Thérèse Guérin in France in 1798. She and several other nuns founded a school for women at St.-Mary-of-the-Woods, Ind., and other schools and orphanages in Indiana and Chicago. She died in 1856.
Benedict also named to sainthood Rosa Venerini, an Italian nun who died in 1728, who advocated the first public schools for girls in Italy and founded an order for teaching nuns.
Also canonized on Sunday were Bishop Rafael Guizar Valencia and the Rev. Filippo Smaldone.
Bishop Valencia was a missionary who tended to the wounded in the Mexican Revolution. He died in 1938. He was the great-uncle of the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, who founded the religious order the Legionaries of Christ and who was censured in May amid allegations that he sexually abused seminarians.
Father Smaldone was an early proponent of education for the deaf, establishing schools for the deaf and blind in southern Italy. He died in 1923. He also founded an order of nuns, the Congregation of the Salesian Sisters of the Sacred Hearts, which has convents in Brazil, Paraguay, Rwanda and Moldavia.