The Pope also pointed out Mother Teresa’s work in trying to make countries aware of their “crimes of poverty”. More than one lakh people attended the ceremony in front of St. Peter’s Basilica.
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The ceremony came nearly 19 years after Teresa’s death in Kolkata, the Indian city where she spent nearly 40 years tending to the poorest of the poor.
Mother Teresa is remembered for her charitable work, primarily with the poor in Calcutta.
Pope Francis (center) waves to the faithful as he leaves a Holy Mass to canonize Mother Teresa of Kolkata, in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican on Sunday.
After Mother Teresa was officially declared a Saint on Sunday, Pope Francis opted to celebrate in true cool Pope fashion: with a huge pizza party for the homeless. “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. As if to emphasize the point, Francis repeated the “the crimes of poverty they themselves created”.
She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950.
That would be correct – but Pope Francis clarified at the ceremony that for many, the name “Mother Teresa” will live on.
Almost 1,500 homeless people from around Italy were taken to the Vatican to be given seats of honour at the mass, and fed by nuns afterwards.
Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910 to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje -then part of the Ottoman Empire, now the capital of Macedonia- Mother Teresa came to India in 1929 as a sister of the Loreto order.
Throngs of pilgrims flooded the Vatican on September 4 to celebrate the highly anticipated canonization of Mother Teresa, an event that Catholics and non-Catholics alike have looked forward to since the nun’s death in 1997.
While her sainthood wasn’t the sole focus of this mass, Mother Teresa was definitely a hot topic of discussion. Today, there are more than 4,500 sisters. “He said Mother Teresa, she’s in the mood for strawberries so I brought her to the best place I knew where to get strawberries”.
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In 2002, the Vatican recognised as a miracle the healing of a tumour in the abdomen of an Indian woman, reportedly after the application of a locket containing Mother Teresa’s picture.
