VATICAN CITY – Some 80,000 pilgrims in flowered lei, feathered headdresses and other traditional garb flooded St. Peter’s Square on Sunday as Pope Benedict XVI added seven more saints onto the roster of Catholic role models in a bid to reinvigorate the faith in parts of the world where it’s lagging.

Two of the new saints were Americans: Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint from the U.S., and Mother Marianne Cope, a 19th-century Franciscan nun who cared for leprosy patients in Hawaii.

It seemed as if a third saint, Pedro Calungsod, a 17th-century Filipino teenage martyr, drew the biggest crowd of all, with Rome’s sizeable Filipino expatriate community turning out in flag-waving droves to welcome the country’s second saint.

In his homily, Benedict praised each of the seven as heroic and courageous examples for the entire church, calling Cope a “shining” model for Catholics and Kateri an inspiration to indigenous faithful across North America.

“May the witness of these new saints … speak today to the whole church, and may their intercession strengthen and sustain her in her mission to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world,” he said.

The celebrations began at dawn, with Native Americans in beaded and feathered headdresses and leather-fringed tunics singing songs to Kateri to the beat of drums as the sun rose over St. Peter’s Square.

Later, the crowds cheered as the pope read out the names of each of the new saints in Latin and declared that they were worthy of veneration by the entire church.

Prayers were read out in Mohawk and Cebuano, the dialect of Calungsod’s native Cebu province, and in English by a nun wearing a lei.

The canonization coincided with a Vatican meeting of the world’s bishops on trying to revive Christianity in places where it’s fallen by the wayside.

Known as the “Lily of the Mohawks,” Kateri was born in 1656 in what is today upstate Net York to a pagan Iroquois father and an Algonquin Christian mother. Her parents and only brother died when she was 4 during a smallpox epidemic that left her badly scarred and with impaired eyesight.

She went to live with her uncle, a Mohawk, and was baptized Catholic by Jesuit missionaries. But she was ostracized and persecuted by other natives for her faith, and she died in what is now Canada when she was 24.

Speaking in English and French, in honor of Kateri’s Canadian ties, Benedict noted how unusual it was in Kateri’s indigenous culture for her to choose to devote herself to her Catholic faith.

“May her example help us to live where we are, loving Jesus without denying who we are,” Benedict said. “Saint Kateri, protectress of Canada and the first Native American saint, we entrust you to the renewal of the faith in the first nations and in all of North America!”

The journey for Kateri was a long one. She was first proposed for sainthood more than a century ago.

“I never thought in my lifetime I would see her as a saint,” said Cindy Ginnish, 51, a member of the Micmac tribe, indigenous to northern New England, Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula.

“I work with addicts,” Ginnish said. “We often say, ‘Pray to Kateri.’ In my own personal experience, she has always helped so many people.”

– McClatchy Newspapers contributed to this report.