University President Jim Towey served as Mother Teresa’s legal counsel for 12 years and volunteered in one of her homes for AIDS patients.
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VATICAN CITY (AP) For numerous poor and destitute whom Mother Teresa served, the tiny nun was a living saint.
Mother Teresa stayed in a room in the convent next door, offered to her by school principal Sr. He said he learned the gift of begging from Mother Teresa.
“She used to visit Odisha as there are several branches of the Missionaries of Charity”.
Nearly 19 years after the diminutive nun passed away, aged 87, she still faces criticism for her approach to charity work. The elevation of the Nobel Peace Prize victor to Catholicism’s celestial pantheon comes on the eve of the 19th anniversary of her death in the Kolkata slums with which she is synonymous.
Affectionately called the “saint of the gutters” during her lifetime, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be made an official saint of the Roman Catholic Church on Sunday, just 19 years after her death. “I thought, what do you wear to see the Pope?” Although her first miracle received criticism because some believed it was due to medical treatment and not divine intervention, the Catholic Church chose to recognize the holy act.
Cheering the pontiff in Saturday’s crowd were many nuns from her Missionaries of Charity order, each wearing the characteristic white sari trimmed in blue that makes them easily identifiable worldwide where they care for the needy. Marcilio Andrino is convinced she also loved him – and interceded with God to cure him of a viral brain infection when doctors had given him little chance of survival.
“The merciful Lord looks at us all without distinction,”Andrino said”.
Mother Teresa, originally named Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu was born to Albanian parents on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, which is now the capital of Macedonia.
Mother Teresa’s devotees began pressing the Vatican soon after her death to speed up the nun’s sainthood cause, saying her holiness was clear to many around the world.
When Pope Francis canonises Mother Teresa on Sunday, two Balkan countries will be celebrating the sainthood of a woman they both fiercely claim as their own. She arrived in India in 1929, becoming a citizen in 1951. We happily carry that torch to study her scholarship and life for years to come.
And that continued even till the last day of her life when she signed the prayer card for a Mumbai couple.
He said he later turned to her for help amid a “terrible scandal” in Fall River when he arrived there in the early 1990s, an apparent reference to a former priest in that diocese who was convicted of molesting children.
The nuns no longer picked up people “randomly” off the streets, she said, and only took in the destitute at the request of police. The late writer Christopher Hitchens was among her most strident critics, labeling her a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud..
But Mother Teresa, one of the most recognisable faces of the 20th century, was put on the fast track to sainthood.
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In 1982, she travelled to Beirut, Lebanon, secretly, to offer her service to the children of Christian-dominated East Beirut and Muslim-dominated West Beirut.
