VATICAN CITY—Pope John Paul II ordained 12 new bishops on Jan. 6 in St. Peter's Basilica, following his annual custom of episcopal ordinations on the solemnity of the Epiphany.

The Holy Father concludes the Christmas season every year by administering the sacraments himself—ordaining bishops on Jan. 6 and baptizing infants in the Sistine Chapel on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which falls this year on Jan. 12.

The two-and-a-half hour ordination Mass is the longest ceremony on the Holy Father's regular schedule and has been adjusted in recent years. This year the Pope remained seated for the laying on of hands and only extended his right hand. Some aspects of the ceremony were entrusted to assisting bishops, as efforts were made to reduce the strain on John Paul at the end of a Christmas season, which featured one of the shortest midnight Masses in memory—less than 90 minutes.

“Your names and your faces speak of the Church universal,” the Holy Father told the new bishops. “You come, in fact, from various nations and continents; and you are now destined for different countries.”

The newly ordained included Bishop Brian Farrell, recently appointed to be the second-in-command at the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, replacing Bishop Marc Ouellet, who has returned to his native Canada to be archbishop of Quebec.

Bishop Farrell, an Irishman with nearly two decades of service in the Vatican Secretariat of State, is the older brother of Bishop Kevin Farrell, the auxiliary bishop of Washington, D.C. Both Farrell brothers were ordained priests for the Legionaries of Christ, though Kevin Farrell later became a diocesan priest.

Other notables among the new bishops were Archbishop Angelo Amato, who will serve as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's new deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Archbishop Celestino Migliore, who will be the Holy See's Permanent Observer (new “ambassador”) to the United Nations.

Three of the other bishops ordained will serve as papal nuncios in various countries. The remaining six are diocesan bishops in Italy, Benin, Slovakia, Iraq, Syria and the Ukraine. The candidates from the Eastern Catholic Churches, with their bishops' crowns and more ornate vestments, lent even more color to the annual ordination.

“Faith in Christ, the light of the world, has guided your steps from your youth until your offering of yourselves in priestly ordination,” John Paul said. “To the Lord you have not given gold, frankincense and myrrh, but your own lives. … You are receiving the fullness of the gift [of the priesthood], and this asks at the same time that you receive the fullness of duty.”

Father Raymond J. de Souza writes from Rome.