Mother Teresa was proclaimed the Saint of Calcutta in a canonisation ceremony by the Pope Francis in St Peter’s Square in Vatican City.
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Tens of thousands of pilgrims packed St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican for a service to honor the tiny nun, who worked among the world’s neediest in the slums of the Indian city now called Kolkata and become one of the most recognizable faces of the 20th century. “She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity”, Pope Francis said.
Ceremonies were also expected in Skopje, Macedonia, where Mother Teresa was born, and also in Albania and Kosovo, where people of her same ethnic Albanian background live.
On Sunday, Lincoln James Gomes, a 38-year-old Christian waited with his mother, wife and child in a muggy monsoon heat to enter the Mother House – where Mother Teresa lived in a simple room – to pray by her marble tomb.
At the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity group that she founded in Kolkata, hundreds of people watching the Mass on TV clapped when Francis declared her a saint.
The crowd followed the proceedings with rapt attention, but erupted in joy a few minutes past 2 p.m. when he declared that the nun would henceforth be called St Teresa. She got permission to leave the convent to pursue her own work. Well before the day she was to take her “children” on a joyride dawned, the station wagon was parked in the premises of her charity. By 1969 it became an global association known to help “the poorest of the poor”, often by undertaking relief work after natural disasters.
“When she came to the United States she was struck by the spiritual poverty”, said Druding.
The debate over the nun’s legacy has continued after her death, with researchers uncovering financial irregularities in the running of her order and evidence mounting of patient neglect, insalubrious conditions and questionable conversions of the vulnerable in her missions. Describing the life of Mother Teresa as “an epitome of grace, compassion and love”, Gandhi said “her saintly life will forever inspire humanity to commit to the cause of those who have no voice, no community, no home, no care and no love”.
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According to correspondence that came to light after she died in 1997, Mother Teresa experienced what the church calls a “dark night of the soul” – a period of spiritual doubt, despair and loneliness that numerous great mystics experienced. Mother Teresa’s compassion and desire to help people she felt were in trouble or forsaken by family and society was absolute. She was also criticized because she spoke out so vehemently against abortion and because, although her help was direct, it was not ongoing.
1950: Missionaries of Charity officially founded on October 7 as a religious congregation.
And some have resented Teresa’s fame, having earned it as an Indian citizen. Four other Indian citizens of Indian descent that have also won Nobel prizes, but they seem to be lesser-known than Teresa.
Speaking in front of a large picture of the nun, Rev. Marijan Ristov said that Teresa dedicated her whole life to “God and human sufferings”.
Though it’s unclear if that was always her idea.
This was a revelation Francis reflected during the ceremony on Sunday.
In 2003, Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa in record time: She had only been dead for six years.
And that was, according to her book, what she aspired to do.
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“Where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul”, she wrote in 1957.
