Mother Teresa “took great chances to help the neediest when others would ignore them”, he said, and “Pope Francis cares about the outcast as much as Mother Teresa did”.
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Coinciding with the canonization of Mother Teresa at St. Peter’s Square, Rome, the diocesan celebration was held at Holy Cross Hall Dimapur on Sunday. However, upon hearing Pope Francis “declare and define Blessed Teresa of Kolkata to be a saint”, the crowds could not contain their joy, breaking out in cheers and thunderous applause before he finished speaking. “It was a city where she lived, but it was not Mother Teresa’s city”. As she made her way through the tight security and past several closed streets to St. Peter’s Square, Maria Demuru said, “I couldn’t miss this”.
Reuters reports that as many as 120,000 people gathered at the Vatican to honor Teresa, who was one of the most well known Catholic figures of the 20th century, establishing a ministry for the poor in the Indian city of Calcutta.
Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910, Teresa came to India in 1929 as a sister of the Loreto order. “And if we accept that the mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” She also “made her voice heard before the powers of this world so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime of poverty they created”, Pope Francis said. Waiting 19 years after Mother Teresa’s death in 1997 “seems like a long time to formally recognise someone as a saint whom we all knew was a saint”, he said.
“Many of our sisters of course we’ve had Mother Teresa’s community here at our cathedral parish for more than 25 years, they got up very early in the middle of the night to watch the celebration and have a little party”, said Monsignor Stanley Deptula with St. Mary’s Cathedral.
The unscripted comments came at a canonisation mass attended by 100,000 pilgrims, including 13 heads of state or government and hundreds of sari-clad nuns from Teresa´s order, the Missionaries of Charity.
“Her heart, she gave it to the world”, said Charlotte Samba, a 52-year-old mother of three who travelled with a church group from Gabon for the Mass. “Mercy, forgiveness, good works: It is the heart of a mother for the poor”. After the Mass, the guests headed to the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall, to eat a lunch consisting of Neapolitan-style pizza. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950.
According to correspondence that came to light after she died in 1997, 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 died 19 years ago, on September 5, 1997, a few days after Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed were killed in the automobile crash in Paris.
Teresa spent all her adult life in India, first teaching, then tending to the dying poor.
Born to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje – then part of the Ottoman empire, now the capital of Macedonia – she won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and was revered around the world as a beacon for the Christian values of self-sacrifice and charity.
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“The heroic exercise of charity and the clear proclamation of truth” were found in Mother Teresa, he said.
