Indeed, she was the subject of a famous diatribe by Christopher Hitchens, who described her as “a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud”.
Advertisement
Her canonisation has been completed in unusually quick time on the back of the extraordinary popularity she enjoyed during her lifetime and with the help of influential supporters. Her weakened heart finally gave out.
But saintly is not a word everyone uses for Mother Teresa.
The family had endured financial hardship and long separations during her protracted illness, so her husband, Selku Murmu, 60, said he was relieved when Besra recovered so quickly.
“There is so much contradiction in my soul”, she wrote to the Bishop of Calcutta in a posthumously published letter dating from 1957.
Last year Pope Francis recognised a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, clearing the way for her to become a saint.
Pope Francis in December approved the miracle after Vatican doctors and theologians determined that Andrino’s cure was medically inexplicable and due to the intercession of Mother Teresa, the final step needed to canonize the nun.
Baptised Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Teresa was born into a Kosovar Albanian family in 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman empire and now the capital of Macedonia.
She left Kolkata on an Emirates flight in the morning. She entered the convent in Dublin, Ireland in 1928, taking the name Teresa, after the patron Saint Therese of Lisieux. The late writer didn’t like her because she took money and awards from lots of creeps – including the awful Duvalier family of Haiti.
“Because her actual canonisation is on Father’s Day, we are having a liturgy the next morning”, she said. The nun and missionary was called a “living saint” before her death in 1997.
Mother was a really a great person who worked, cared and loved our people, particularly the poor, irrespective of religion or caste.
And as I have said before, it is handsome to reflect how many Saints, Blesseds, Venerables and Servants of God have lived and worked and walked these streets here in Los Angeles.
Mother Teresa was also an activist for peace and is well remembered for her anti-abortion stance, which she said went hand in hand with promoting peace as abortion was the “enemy of peace”. But this aspect was not so important, he said: “What matters most is her legacy to the world and her message that the world is not only hungry for bread, but even more for love”. “For we are touching the Body of Christ 24 hours”.
Fr Groeschel was forthright about her appearance when he first met her: “Her face looked like a baseball hit her”. She’s the saint for the poor, she’s the saint for the special needs. Her critics say she was anything but. There are believed to be more than 10,000 saints.
Even her path to sainthood has been controversial.
He would maybe see her a half dozen times a year and would often take pictures of mother meeting her many admirers.
Advertisement
The 25-year-old singer told US TV presenter Jimmy Fallon that she was performing at the Vatican during an appearance on the Tonight Show.
