Pope prays for Mideast peace

The pope said a prayer during a servive of beatification

VATICAN CITY, Italy -- Pope John Paul II has said a prayer for peace in the Middle East during a service to beatify six people.

The pope said: "We turn to You, entrusting You in particular with the suffering in the Holy Land.

"I invite prayer so that the current efforts to re-establish respect for people and property and to encourage a just and lasting peace are successful."

The pope celebrated the beatification of six people -- elevating two women and four men to one step from sainthood, including four who worked with the poor and sick in Latin America.

The six candidates, he said, with their lives of goodness, "became enthusiastic and courageous witnesses before the world."

He praised their dedication to God in the face of difficulty and fear at a ceremony attended by hundreds from around the world in St Peter's Square.

Sister Maria Romero Meneses, "mother of the poor" who died in 1977, was born in Nicaragua and received her religious education in El Salvador but spent most of her active life in Costa Rica dedicated to works of evangelisation and charity.

Speaking of her, John Paul expressed hope that the "beloved Central American people may find in the newly beatified, who loved them so much, abundant examples and instruction to renew and fortify the Christian life, so rooted in those lands."

One Italian-born candidate, Father Luigi Variara dedicated his life to caring for lepers in Colombia until 1923.

Artemide Zatti, looked after the sick in Argentina, earning him the name "the saintly nurse of Patagonia."

Two Italian priests born in the late 18th century and Argentina's Maria del Transito de Jesus Sacramentado, who founded the Franciscan Tertiary Missionary Sisters of Argentina, were also beatified on Sunday.

Beatification is the penultimate step before sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church.

The pope has beatified some 1,300 people, more than all his predecessors in the last four centuries combined.

In his 23-year-old papacy, he has also canonised 456 people, far outstripping the pace of his predecessors.