NEW BLESSEDS SATISFIED THIRST OF MANY BROTHERS AND SISTERS

VATICAN CITY, MAR 7, 1999 (VIS) - John Paul II this morning, in St. Peter's Basilica, beatified ten Servants of God who, he said, "drank from the fountain of Christ's love, to the point of being deeply transformed and changed into overflowing fountains quenching the thirst of so many brothers and sisters who met them during their lives."

Blessed Vicente Soler, his six Augustinian Recollect companions and Manuel Martin Sierra who was a priest, were all Spanish martyrs who, in 1936, "did not die for an ideology" said the Pope, "but who freely gave their lives for the One who had died for them. ... They worked for years in mission lands, they suffered many hardships in the Philippines, they toiled fields in Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela by the sweat of their brow, they founded social and educational projects in Motril and other parts of Spain. ... They faced death with serene souls, comforting the other people condemned with them, and pardoning their executioners."

Speaking of the French Minim priest Nicolas Barre (1621-1686), founder of the Congregations of the Sisters of the Child Jesus (Saint Maur) and the Sisters of the Child Jesus of Providence of Rouen, the Holy Father said that "his ministry put him continually in contact with people who lived in the desert of religious ignorance and who ran the risk of drinking from the contaminated fountain of certain ideas of their time. For this reason he felt the duty to become a spiritual teacher and educator."

The Pope finally referred to the German Blessed Anna Schaffer (1882-1925), a lay woman, who said that her room, as a patient, was the "the place of the work of suffering." Despite her long and painful illness, she carried out an apostolate by correspondence and by doing little things for others, aware of the "responsibility of every Christian for the salvation of the others."

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