Church bells rang out and fireworks burst in the sky Sunday as Venezuela — mired in crisis — welcomed the canonization of two of its people as saints.

Pope Leo XIV proclaimed seven new saints earlier in the day in the Vatican, including Jose Gregorio Hernandez Cisneros, a layman who died in 1919, whom the late Pope Francis called a “doctor close to the weakest.”

Also from Venezuela was Maria Carmen Rendiles Martinez, a nun born without a left arm who overcame her disability to found the Congregation of the Servants of Jesus before her death in 1977. She is now the South American country’s first female saint.

Some Venezuelans called this a “double blessing” for a country which has endured years of economic crisis marked by shortages of food and other basics, plus political repression und

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