Amid African singing and dancing, a slightly stronger-looking Pope John Paul extended his saint-making record on Sunday by canonizing three men who worked as missionaries in the 19th century.
Although he looked better than on Saturday, the pope, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, read only the Italian part of his homily while a cardinal read the German part.
This was apparently to help the 83-year-old pope, bedecked in gold vestments, conserve his strength for the rest of the ceremony for tens of thousands of people in an overcast St Peter's Square.
There have been growing fears recently for the health of the Roman Catholic leader, who can no longer walk without assistance and has struggled to speak at some public appearances.
But his words were much clearer on Sunday than they were on Saturday when he appeared particularly tired during a meeting with the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
At the end of the two-and-a-half hour ceremony, the pope said that "God willing" he would make a planned trip on Tuesday to a shrine in the southern city of Pompeii.
His chair was then placed on an open "popemobile" and driven through the crowd.
RECORD NUMBER OF SAINTS
Sunday's ceremony brought to 476 the number of people the pope has canonized, more than all of his predecessors combined since the current saint-making process began in the 16th century, according to Vatican figures.
The pope used the occasion, where African women in animal skin tribal dress danced on the steps of Christendom's largest church, to make another appeal for Africa.
"Even today, how can we not turn our gaze with affection and worry (to Africa) which continues to be marked by so many difficulties and problems," he said, reading in slow Italian.
"May the international community actively help her to build a future of hope."
The three new saints, an Italian, a German and an Austrian, were instrumental in the evangelization of Africa and China.
The most famous was Daniele Comboni, who worked as a missionary in Sudan before founding the order of priests that carries his name and now works in many countries around the world.
Comboni, who abhorred the slave trade and whose motto to help Africans was "Africa or death," died in Khartoum in 1881 at the age of 50. There are about 4,000 Comboni missionaries around the world today.
The Church credits Comboni with a miracle cure of a Muslim Sudanese woman whose hemorrhage stopped after a nun put a picture of Comboni under her pillow.
Another new saint is Arnold Janssen, who was born in the lower Rhineland in 1837.
When anti-Catholic laws in Germany led to the expulsion of many priests and bishops, he moved to the Netherlands and began the Divine Word Missionaries. They now work in 63 countries.
The third is Josef Freinademetz, born in 1852 in the South Tyrol, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire which was given to Italy after World War One.
He joined the Divine Word Missionaries and worked most of his life in China, where he died in 1907. Catholics in China prayed to him recently to protect them from the SARS virus.