Pope declared Mary Mackillop as the Australia's first Saint

Pope Benedict XVI is due to officially recognise Australia's first saint, Mary MacKillop, a Melbourne-born nun who worked with needy children.Thousands of Australians have arrived in Rome to witness the canonisation of MacKillop, who died in 1909.She clashed with senior clergy and was briefly excommunicated, in part for exposing a sex-abusing priest.Five other people are to be canonised, among them Brother Andre, a Canadian monk credited with healing powers.

After excommunicating Mary MacKillop in 1871, the Church later exonerated her and she was eventually put on the road to sainthood by Pope John Paul II, who beatified her in 1995.For anyone to become a saint, the Church has to officially recognise their intermediary role in two miracles.Pope John Paul II recognised the first, and last year Pope Benedict ruled a person had been cured of cancer after praying for the nun's assistance.Because of her role in exposing clerical abuse, some have called for MacKillop to made a patron saint of abused children.In recent years, there has been a wave of cases around the world in which Church authorities failed to deal properly with priests accused of child abuse, sometimes just moving them to newparishes where more children were put at risk.'Extraordinary Australian woman'Hundreds of nuns from the order MacKillop helped found, the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, have travelled to the Vaticanto witness her canonisation.

Four steps to sainthood

The process, which cannot begin until at least five years after the candidate's death, involves scrutinisingevidence of their holiness, work and signs that people are drawn to prayer through their example:

• First stage: individual is declared a 'servant of God'
• Second stage: individual is called 'venerable'
• Third stage (requires a miracle attributed to candidate's intercession): beatification, when individual is declared blessed
• Fourth stage (requires a further authenticated miracle): candidate is canonised as a saint for veneration by Church
• Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd will also be among the spectators.

He described MacKillop as "an extraordinary Australian woman".She has become a kind of religious celebrity in Australia, where there is great anticipation about her canonisation, says the BBC's Duncan Kennedy in Rome.She has been the subject of a musical, has stamps and pop songs in her honour and her image has been projected onto Sydney's Harbour Bridge.Thousands of people have attended a Mass in Melbourne's St Patrick's Cathedral to mark her passage to sainthood.And all week, pilgrims have been converging on the chapel and museum at the site in North Sydney where she died, says the BBC's Nick Bryant in Sydney.Candidates from Canada, Poland, Italy and Spain are also being officially recognised as saints at the Vatican ceremony.

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