VATICAN CITY -- Before one of the largest and most orderly pilgrim crowds in Vatican history, Pope John Paul II canonized Msgr. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer and called the Opus Dei founder's message of sanctifying ordinary life valid for all believers.

"To raise the world to God and transform it from within: This is the ideal that the holy founder indicates to you," the pope said during the Oct. 6 canonization Mass.

Police said at least 300,000 people -- more than three times Opus Dei's membership -- packed St. Peter's Square and nearby streets, where huge speakers and video screens broadcast the two-and-a-half-hour liturgy.

The huge crowd was silent while the pope read the Latin formula proclaiming the Spanish priest a saint, but as soon as he finished the crowd erupted into applause that echoed off surrounding buildings.

In his homily, the pope said St. Escriva's vision for Opus Dei, which he founded in 1928, harmonized with the Second Vatican Council's message that Christians should not shun the world but work from within it.

Even in the grind of "apparently monotonous" daily events, "God comes close to us, and we can cooperate in his plan of salvation," the pope said.

The new saint "continues to remind us of the need not to allow ourselves to be frightened in the face of a materialist culture, which threatens to dissolve the most genuine identity of the disciples of Christ," he said.

"He liked to repeat with vigor that the Christian faith is opposed to conformism and interior inertia," the pope said.

He said the secret of the Opus Dei founder's holiness -- as with all saints -- was his dedication to prayer and a "constant and intense sacramental life."

The canonization came 27 years after St. Escriva's death -- one of the shortest waiting periods in the church's history.

Beatified in 1992, St. Escriva was cleared for canonization last year when the Vatican approved of a miracle attributed to his intercession. It involved the medically unexplainable 1992 cure of a Spanish physician suffering from a progressive skin disease as a result of years of exposure to X-ray radiation.

Over the years Opus Dei has had a sometimes-controversial reputation, which it has blamed mainly on ignorance and the relative newness of its 20-year existence as the church's only personal prelature, sort of a diocese without geographical boundaries.

In an apparent reference to the criticisms, the pope said, "Certainly, there is no lack of misunderstandings and difficulties for those who are intent on serving with fidelity the cause of the Gospel."

Opus Dei today numbers about 83,000 lay members and 1,800 priests in about 60 countries.

The ceremony was attended by high-level government delegations from Spain, Italy, Kenya and more than a dozen Latin American countries, as well as non-Catholic delegations and representatives of other church movements.

Many Italian commentators remarked on the extraordinary composure and orderliness of the crowd. Even in the packed side streets, many pilgrims knelt on the cobblestones during the Mass' consecration and formed patient lines to the more than 1,000 priests who were distributing Communion.

Organizers said the canonization was attended by people from at least 84 countries. Pilgrims from Italy and Spain -- the new saint's home country -- represented the largest groups, followed by those from the United States, Mexico, Germany and France.

Among them was Mary Ann Germetzke, a mother of four from Evansville, Wis., who said the new saint gives lay people confidence that they, too, can become saints.

"Most people think that you cannot be a saint unless you are part of a religious order -- that there is no meaning in ordinary life," she said.

"He gives hope to those who feel that there is no hope, that I don't count, that I don't matter in my little life," she said.

Germetzke said the main reason she and her husband came to the canonization Mass was to thank the new saint for the medically unexplainable cure six months ago of their youngest child, who during delivery lost most of her blood and was without oxygen for 16 minutes.

"The doctors told us that if she lived -- which wasn't a sure thing -- she would be a vegetable for the rest of her life," Germetzke said, holding the baby in her arms.

But after the prayers of her parish priest and Opus Dei friends, the baby, Anne Elizabeth, came home from the hospital perfectly healthy 10 days later, said Germetzke. She said she and her husband were "not yet" members of Opus Dei.

The day after the canonization, Bishop Javier Echevarria Rodriguez, head of Opus Dei, celebrated a thanksgiving Mass in St. Peter's Square for another record crowd of more than 200,000 pilgrims that spilled out of the square several blocks toward the Tiber River.

Addressing pilgrims in the square after the Mass, the pope underscored the new saint's efforts to conform himself completely to God's will, which he said ought to be the goal of every believer.

"The Lord has a plan for each one of us," the pope said. "Saints cannot even conceive of themselves outside of God's plan: They live only to fulfill it."

The pope said Christians should trust in God as a loving father even in difficult times and "never feel alone or frightened."

"The Christian is necessarily an optimist because he knows that he is a son of God in Christ," he said.

The canonization was to be the high point of a week of celebrations.

The Opus Dei founder's body, in its original wooden casket, was moved from the small chapel in Opus Dei's Rome headquarters, where it usually rests, to a nearby church for veneration Oct. 3-10.

In more than a dozen churches throughout Rome, organizers planned about 30 thanksgiving Masses in 18 different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian. Cardinals, bishops and top Vatican officials were to preside at the Masses.