Sawt Falasteen - Ex-Satanic priest among seven new saints created by Pope Leo

Bells rang out over St Peter's Square for the ceremony, which saw him canonise that ex-occultist priest, Bartolo Longo, alongside a lay catechist from Papua New Guinea, an archbishop killed in the Armenian genocide, a Venezuelan "doctor of the poor" and three nuns who dedicated their lives to the poor and sick.

The former Satanic priest Longo, an Italian lawyer born in 1841 and who died in 1926, rejoined Catholicism and went on to found the Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompeii.

"Today we have before us seven witnesses, the new Saints, who, with God's grace, kept the lamp of faith burning," Leo told an audience the Vatican estimated at some 70,000 people.

"May their intercession assist us in our trials and their example inspire us in our shared vocation to holiness," he said during his homily.

Huge portraits of the seven were unfurled from windows over the square as Leo, the first US pope, emerged from St Peter's Basilica dressed in a ceremonial white cassock with a mitre on his head, preceded by white-clad bishops and cardinals.

Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints -- the Vatican department charged with beatification and canonisation -- read aloud profiles of the seven to applause from the crowd.

With Leo's reading of the canonisation formula, they were officially declared saints.

In his homily, Leo described the new saints as either "martyrs for their faith", "evangelisers and missionaries", "charismatic founders" of congregations or "benefactors of humanity".

The rite of canonisation was the second for the former Robert Prevost since he was made leader of the Catholic Church on May 8.

Last month, he proclaimed as saints Italians Carlo Acutis -- a teenager dubbed "God's Influencer" who spread the faith online before his death at age 15 in 2006 -- and Pier Giorgio Frassati, considered a model of charity who died in 1925, aged 24.

Canonisation is the final step towards sainthood in the Catholic Church, following beatification.

Three conditions are required -- most crucially that the individual has performed at least two miracles. He or she must be deceased for at least five years and have led an exemplary Christian life.

- Martyrs, humanitarians -

Among those made saints Sunday were Peter To Rot, a lay catechist from Papua New Guinea killed during the Japanese occupation during World War II, Armenian bishop Ignazio Choukrallah Maloyan killed by Turkish forces in 1915, and Venezuela's Jose Gregorio Hernandez Cisneros, a layman who died in 1919, whom the late Pope Francis called a "doctor close to the weakest".

Also from Venezuela was Maria Carmen Rendiles Martinez, a nun born without a left arm who overcame her disability to found the Congregation of the Servants of Jesus before her death in 1977. She becomes the South American country's first female saint.

The Italian nuns canonised are Vincenza Maria Poloni, the 19th-century founder of Verona's Institute of the Sisters of Mercy, which cares primarily for the sick in hospitals, and Maria Troncatti of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians.

In the 1920s, Troncatti arrived in Ecuador to devote her life to helping its indigenous population.

Circling St Peter's Square in his popemobile after the service, Leo went far beyond its confines, travelling down the Via della Conciliazione linking the Vatican to Rome, stopping frequently to bless babies among the thousands of well-wishers.

Z.AlNajjar--SF-PST