October 15, 2025 // Pope Leo XIV

New Saints Highlight Power of Faith Amid Challenges

OSV NEWS

(OSV News) – When Pope Leo XIV raises three women and four men to the altar on Sunday, October 19, he will canonize a diverse group of religious and lay men and women, all bound by the virtue of holding on to their faith amid personal, spiritual, and external challenges.

The canonizations, which were announced by the Vatican in June during the pope’s first ordinary public consistory, will elevate to sainthood seven candidates who hail from Venezuela, Turkey, Papua New Guinea, and Italy.

Blessed María Carmen Elena Rendiles Martínez, who was born without a left arm, overcame physical challenges and founded a religious congregation, the Servants of Jesus of Caracas, which was dedicated to pastoral ministry and education.

Blessed Maria Troncatti, an Italian Salesian, dedicated her life as a missionary to Indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest, earning her the informal title of “doctor of the jungle,” while Blessed Vincenza Maria Poloni dedicated her ministry to the sick and the poor, whom she deemed as “our masters.”

Others, such as Blessed Ignazio Choukrallah Maloyan, an Armenian Catholic archbishop, and Blessed Peter To Rot, were martyred for their faith.

Among the most well-known is Blessed Bartolo Longo, a former Satanist priest who, after his conversion, dedicated his life as a Dominican tertiary to promoting the Rosary and Marian devotion.

Blessed Bartolo Longo, who was born in 1841, is seen in an undated painting. He had been a militant opponent of the church and involved in the occult, but converted, dedicating himself to charity and to building the Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompei. He died in 1926. (CNS photo/courtesy of the Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompei)

For Dominican Father Joseph Anthony Kress, promoter of the Rosary for the Province of St. Joseph and associate director of the Dominican Friars Foundation, the example of the challenges faced by Blessed Longo and the other six sainthood candidates shows “that this earthly pilgrimage is not a sanitized experience.”

Speaking to OSV News, Father Kress said that like Christ, who stumbled and fell “on His way to making that supreme sacrifice,” Christian lives reflect the same struggle.

“We don’t need to try to perfect or sanitize our lives before we offer them to Jesus, but we can invite him into the suffering and the struggle,” he said.

“All of these saints experienced different elements of struggle throughout their lives: physical struggles, psychological struggles, spiritual desolations. But in the midst of all of that, they maintained a constant relationship with the Lord and invited Him into those moments.”

“That’s where holiness is,” Father Kress added. “Holiness, I think, is the most profound when there’s a struggle present.”

Another notable aspect of some of the candidates is the fact that they were lay members of the Catholic Church. Blessed Longo was a lay member of the Dominican order, while Blessed José Gregorio Hernández Cisneros of Venezuela was a Franciscan tertiary. Blessed Peter To Rot, a martyr from Papua New Guinea, was married and served as a lay catechist.

Father Kress told OSV News that those like Blessed Longo and Blessed Hernández prove that “we can still be inspired by the great charisms of these religious orders in the Catholic Church, and to be unafraid to pursue that; to be unafraid of committing to that.”

“We live in a society … that is just so fraught and afraid to make any kind of commitment to a specific thing,” he said. “And some of these saints who have been tertiaries have made those commitments, and it’s a great message of hope and confidence in the Lord, and confidence in our individual humanity and personalities to say, ‘This charism is something that attracts me, and I want to participate in that in ways that make sense.’”