Pope John Paul II has canonised five new Spanish saints at a mass in a central Madrid square attended by hundreds of thousands of faithful.
The two priests and three nuns took the number of Spanish declared saints in the past five years to 20.
The new saints include the priest Pedro Proveda Castroverde, who was executed after being captured by Republicans early in the 1936-39 civil war.
Worshippers poured into central Madrid for the mass, the high point of a 36-hour visit to Spain in which he pressed for peace in a world split by the Iraq war.
Old people, nuns and flag-carrying youngsters arrived by metro, coach, taxi, car and on foot to celebrate the 0800 GMT mass.
‘Long live the pope’ banners were strung across streets.
Police sealed off much of the centre and lined the pope's route as part of a huge security operation involving 5,000 police officers and 10,000 volunteers.
The pope, whose energetic campaign to avert the war in Iraq ultimately failed, drove home his message of peace in two public appearances yesterday, repeating the word ‘peace’ about 10 times.
‘Peace ... is above all a gift from on high that we must ask for insistently and that we must build among all of us ...,’ said the pope, who is on his 99th overseas trip, but his first since he visited his native Poland last August.
The pope's unequivocal anti-war message has struck a chord with Spaniards, who were resolutely against the US-led invasion of Iraq, despite Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's support for the use of force.
The pontiff, on his fifth visit to Spain in his nearly 25-year papacy, showed he was as popular as ever as around 600,000 young people gave him a rapturous welcome at a party-like rally near Madrid yesterday evening.
Although he turns 83 later this month and suffers from Parkinson's disease and arthritis, the pope appeared in better health than of late, reading speeches in a confident Spanish.
‘I am a young person aged 83,’ he quipped as he soaked up the adulation of a crowd which greeted his words with squeals of excitement, tears and chants of ‘We love you’.
The pope told his young audience to ‘shun every form of nationalism, racism and intolerance.’
His warning about nationalism had added significance in Spain, where ETA has killed more than 830 people since 1968 in a campaign for an independent Basque state.
