Sao Paulo, Brazil - Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims filled a Sao Paulo park Friday for an open-air mass during which Pope Benedict XVI canonized Brazil's first saint.
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"Brazil is great, Brazil is beautiful and today we have a saint," said 17-year-old pilgrim Juliane Oliveira de Souza.
Thousands had spent the night in the vast Campo de Marte huddled under blankets and coats to be assured a good position for the mass, the biggest event so far in the pope's five-day visit to Brazil.
A giant wooden cross dominates the venue, where Benedict's predecessor John Paul II beatified a 16th-century Canarian Jesuit missionary to Brazil, Jose de Anchieta, in 1980.
"Thanks to God I can see the pope. I came Monday from (northeastern) Sergipe, and we've been in Campo de Marte since 11 last night," said Mara Clara Machado Dotti, three children in tow.
Demilson Goncalves, a 32-year-old nurse, told AFP he had been cured of a hernia by Friar Antonio de Sant'Ana Galvao, a Franciscan monk still credited with miracle cures nearly 200 years after his death.
The Church hopes that elevating Galvao to sainthood will help reverse major inroads that evangelical faiths have made not only in Brazil, but also across Latin America, which is home to almost half the world's population of 1.1 billion Catholics.
The canonization mass follows close on the heels of a rally late Thursday attended by tens of thousands of Latin American young people at a Sao Paulo football stadium where Benedict urged them to "be apostles of youth."
"I send you out ... on the great mission of evangelizing young men and women who have gone astray in this world like sheep without a shepherd," the German pontiff said, urging youths to draw their inspiration from "universal moral values."
The former head of the Vatican's top doctrinal body as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger reiterated his strict line against abortion and euthanasia with his frequent phrase, "promote life from its beginning to its natural end."
Benedict, 80, also urged young people to respect marriage and practice chastity. "Inside and outside marriage, chastity should be made a bulwark."
The speech -- coupled with a debate over abortion after Benedict and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva traded public comments on the sensitive subject -- prompted a cartoon in a Sao Paulo newspaper Friday showing a dour-looking pope carrying a staff with a hammer at the top instead of a crucifix.
A first miracle attributed to him and recognized by the Church occurred at the start of the 19th century when a patient was cured of kidney stones after he had her swallow three small pieces of paper on which he had written prayers for divine intercession.
Beatification is the step before sainthood, which requires at least two miracles attributed to the candidate.
Two much more recent miracles attributed to Galvao have been recognized by the Vatican: In 1990, a four-year-old girl recovered from what was considered incurable hepatitis, and in 1999 a mother and child survived a high-risk birth in what the Vatican called a "scientifically inexplicable" case.
Later in the day the pope will meet around 430 Brazilian bishops in Sao Paulo's Cathedral da Se, after which he will travel to nearby Aparecida to open a conference of Latin American bishops on Sunday, the final day of his trip.
That meeting will be aimed at giving impetus to the missionary reach of the church in the region.
Latin America is home to nearly half of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, with Brazil the largest stronghold with 155,000. But in recent years the Church has lost ground to rival evangelical faiths, as well as to a growing number of people who have abandoned religion altogether.
In Brazil, 64 percent of the population is Catholic, but the figure has fallen from 74 percent a decade ago, according to a recent study. At the same time, the number of evangelical followers has risen to 17 percent from 11 percent, the Datafolha institute said.