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Pope Francis the First proclaimed 10 new saints on Sunday after recovering from knee pain that forced him to use a wheelchair and leading the Vatican's first canonization ceremony in two years, AP reported.

At the beginning of the ceremony, Francis stood for a long time greeting the priests who were celebrating Mass, and then hobbled up to the altar to proclaim the saints of six men and four women. Among them are a Dutch priest-journalist killed by the Nazis, a secular Indian convert killed for his faith, and half a dozen French and Italian priests and nuns who founded religious orders.

It was the first canonization mass in the Vatican since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ceremony was attended not only by high-ranking officials of Italy, in particular, the President of the country, but also by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, the Minister of the Interior of France and the Minister of Minorities of India, as well as tens of thousands of believers filled the sunny square, decorated with Dutch flowers in honor of the Reverend Titus Brandsma , a holy martyr who died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1942.

Leading up to his canonization, a group of Dutch and German journalists officially proposed that Brandsma be made a patron saint of journalists along with Saint Francis de Sales, given his work in combating propaganda and fake news during the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe.

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