Mother Teresa declared a saint
VATICAN CITY: Mother Teresa, the Catholic nun who worked on behalf of the poor in the Indian city of Kolkata for a half-century, was declared a saint by Pope Francis yesterday.
Nineteen years after her death at the age of 87, the title was bestowed in a ceremony in St Peter’s Square attended by tens of thousands of admirers.
The open-air mass was a high point of the pope’s Holy Year of Mercy, which ends in November.
“Mother Teresa, throughout her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy,” the pope told the cheering crowd.
“She attended to the weary who were allowed to die on the roadside because she recognised the dignity God had given them. She raised her voice against the world’s powerful, so that they would recognise their guilt for the crime of poverty that they created,” Francis said.
Across India, special prayer ceremonies and events were being held, including at the Kolkata headquarters of the Roman Catholic missionary founded by Mother Teresa.
President Pranab Mukherjee called her a “messiah of the poor and a pillar of support for the weak and suffering”, adding that every Indian takes pride in her canonisation.
Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, the ethnic Albanian Teresa became an icon of the 20th century through her service to India’s most destitute.
In 1950, she was given permission to open her own order in Kolkata, the Missionaries of Charity, with the purpose of caring for those who had no one to look after them.
Nuns of her order, with their trademark blue-bordered, white saris, picked up abandoned children from the streets, cleaned the wounds of lepers and tended to the mentally ill.
Today the order has 4 500 members and runs homes for the homeless in 133 countries.
“The loneliest, the most wretched and the dying have, at her hands, received compas- sion without condescension, based on reverence for man,” the Nobel committee said in 1979, as it awarded her the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Vatican recognised her sainthood after attributing two “miracles” to her: the curing of an Indian tribal woman from stomach tumour in 1998, and the healing of a Brazilian man from several brain tumours 10 years later.
She also received a fair share of criticism: over medical neglect at the homes for the dying, over religious fundamentalism, over baptising the dying without consulting them, over taking money from dictators and over financial irregularities as her order grew.
But for most people, especially in India where she chose to work, Teresa was loved and revered, often referred to as the “Angel of the Poor” and “Saint of the Gutter.”
Mother Teresa’s path to sainthood was one of the fastest in the history of the Catholic Church. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II and given the title Blessed Teresa of Kolkata in 2003.
After the canonisation ceremony, the pope invited 1 500 homeless people for pizza.
Many of the homeless are living in shelters established by Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity and were given a special welcome at the celebration in St Peter’s Square. – ANADPA