Pope Leo XIV canonized Venezuela’s beloved “doctor of the poor” Sunday before tens of thousands of people, offering the South American nation its first saint and a reason to celebrate amid a yearslong economic crisis and new tensions with the United States.

José Gregorio Hernández, revered by millions for his dedication to poor people, was declared a saint alongside Mother Carmen Rendiles Martínez, the founder of a Venezuelan religious order, at a Mass in St. Peter’s Square that Leo called a “great celebration of holiness.”

Thousands of jubilant Venezuelans filled the square and draped Venezuelan flags on its police barricades, adding splashes of red, blue and yellow that perfectly matched the uniforms of the attending Swiss Guards.

Thousands more who couldn't travel to Rome marked the occasion in Caracas, where the Vatican service was livestreamed before dawn at a downtown plaza.

The Mass, which the Vatican said drew some 70,000 people, also gave Papua New Guinea its first saint: Peter To Rot, a layman killed in prison in 1945 for standing up for monogamous marriage at a time when polygamy was practiced.

In all, seven people were canonized in a ceremony that Pope Francis put in motion in some of his final acts as pope.

In fact, Francis approved Hernández’s canonization from his hospital room on February 24, agreeing to bypass the Vatican’s typical miracle confirmation process to pronounce him a saint based on the “widespread veneration of the ‘doctor-saint’ among the faithful,” the Vatican said.

Hernández is beloved among Venezuelans, with his face plastered on street art around Caracas, in portraits in hospitals and in photos gracing individual home altars.

As a doctor in Caracas during the late 1800s and early 1900s, he refused to take money from poor people for his services and often gave them money for medicine, earning the nickname “doctor of the poor.”

He was killed in 1919 while crossing a street shortly after picking up some medicine at a pharmacy to bring to a poor elderly woman.

He became a religious icon after his death, and when Pope John Paul II visited Venezuela in 1996, he received a petition signed by 5 million people — almost one in four Venezuelans — asking that he declare Hernández a saint.

The canonization was a long-awaited celebration and a boost for Venezuela, just weeks after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize.

It comes as tensions mount with the United States over Washington’s use of military force against suspected drug cartels.