A slightly stronger-looking Pope John Paul extended his saint-making record today by canonising 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 conserve his strength for the rest of the ceremony for tens of thousands of people in an overcast St Peter's Square in the Vatican.
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.
Sunday's ceremony brought to 476 the number of people the pope has canonised, more than all of his predecessors combined since the current saint-making process began in the 16th century, according to Vatican figures.
Italian, German & Austrian missionaries honoured
The three new saints, an Italian, a German and an Austrian, were instrumental in the evangelisation 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.
The Church credits Comboni with a miracle cure of a Muslim Sudanese woman whose haemorrhage 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, Janssen 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.
'Serious difficulties' between churches
The Pope has warned the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, that 'new and serious difficulties have arisen' in relations between the two Churches.
In what correspondents say was an indirect reference to homosexual clergy, the Pope told Archbishop Rowan Williams that Christians had to be protected from what he called erroneous and misguided interpretations of the faith.
The Pope said that the 'difficulties' were not all of a merely disciplinary nature, but that some extended to 'essential matters of faith and morals'.
