“She was a woman of such extraordinary witness to Christian faith, especially to care for the poor, the abandoned, the downtrodden”, said Thomas Groome, a Boston College professor of theology.
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As Pope Francis prepares to declare Mother Teresa a saint of the Roman Catholic Church on September 4, a string of top Indian politicians are heading to the Vatican to witness her canonization, underlining her popularity in her adopted home.
Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said all 100,000 tickets have been distributed for Sunday’s Mass but the crowd will probably be far greater, spilling into the main streets around St Peter’s Square. I remember one Wednesday she told me only had $40 in the bank and school payroll was Friday. A frequent visitor to NY, she opened her order’s first United States house here in 1971. For almost 50 years, Mother Teresa experienced what the church calls a “dark night of the soul”: a period of spiritual doubt, characterized by such loneliness and unhappiness that she believed she was experiencing the “tortures of hell” and found herself unable to pray. “But, if you want to see love, please look at Mother Teresa”, Ahmed said.
Mother Teresa was born Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu of Albanian parents in Skopje in 1910 in what is now Macedonia.
Theresa arrived in India in 1929, becoming a citizen in 1951. Since its establishment in 1950, the order has set up hundreds of shelters that care for the poor worldwide.
The case for canonization is usually initiated five years after the candidate’s death, but Pope John Paul II waived this for Teresa, putting her on a fast track to sainthood.
Calling her the patron saint of “those who can not have a child” and of “frequent flyers”, Fr Kolodiejchuk said that in this year of mercy, the message of Mother Teresa is that “Calcutta is everywhere, there is interior poverty, the Calcutta of the heart”.
On Sunday, Pope Francis will officially recognize Mother Teresa as a saint at a ceremony in the Vatican.
“The miracles attributed to Mother Teresa for her sainthood are fictitious claims”. It’s actually to celebrate Mother Teresa, who has now become a saint.
“In her lifetime, she took us close to God and she is still doing that. She was instrumental in our baptism”, she told RNS. But, she had a mother’s heart. It was then that she saw a “blinding light”.
The nun was also a controversial figure to some.
In 1991, the British medical journal the Lancet visited a home she ran in Kolkata for the dying and said untrained carers failed to recognise when some patients could have been cured.
“Once I was treating a man, I was feeding him and cleaning him and taking him to the bathroom and bringing him back and I went to go get something and I came back and he was dead”.
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She has been credited with two miracles, both involving the healing of sick people. They have maintained that all she was suffering from was a cyst, not a tumour, and recovered after prolonged tuberculosis treatment.
