Teresa’s sainthood should not be an occasion to rejoice but to reflect on the future mission of the Church as Christ intended it to be.
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Kolkata: Not known to express their emotions in public, nuns of the Missionaries of Charity yesterday cheered loudly, clapped freely and rang bells the moment Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint.
“By embracing the poverty of the Gospel, Mother Teresa and her sisters also address not only the physical poverty of the poorest of the poor but indeed the spiritual poverty of those who have more than enough possessions yet live their lives estranged from God and from others”, he said.
Mother Teresa saint of the gutters has been so named by the Church, but what she did for Sister Mary Johnice as told by Archbishop Vigneron proves she is a saint to those called to help as well.
Baltimore is considered the birthplace of Catholicism in the United States, as John Carroll established the first diocese of the church in the nation. “I think we’ll carry on calling her Mother Teresa”, he said, speaking from under a canopy in front of St. Peter’s Basilica on a blazingly hot and cloudless Roman day.
Mother Teresa may have just been made a saint but she has some fierce opponents.
The BBC’s Sanjoy Majumder on Kolkata’s celebrations of Mother Teresa’s canonisation. One is a woman from Calcutta, who claims her stomach tumor was cured by praying to the saint. “She dedicated her life to loving others, so why not me, why not us?”
“By her dealing with those who were at the very bottom of society, dying in the streets of Calcutta; by her compassion and love, the world was captivated”, he said. “Mother Teresa was good to us”, she said. At the time of her death, Missionaries of Charity supported 4,000 nuns and ran hundreds of orphanages, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics around the world. “She lived in humility and simplicity like the poor of the earth and was never ashamed of that”.
While big, the crowd wasn’t even half of the 300,000 who turned out for Mother Teresa’s 2003 beatification, thanks in part to security fears in the wake of Islamic extremist attacks in Europe.
In spite of her huge popularity, Mother Teresa’s critics, who included the late author Christopher Hitchens, endure.
“For me, nothing has changed”, said Giovanna Tommasi, lay member of the Missionaries of Charity, a religious order Mother Teresa founded in 1950.
Teresa was born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910.
Applause erupted around the square on Sunday morning from thousands of the faithful who had made the pilgrimage to see Pope Francis officially make the nun who cared for the world’s destitute a saint. “Maybe a smile, maybe somebody is going through something, say a prayer for that person, or a cup of water or also big things like cleaning the wounds of the people”. For this Teresa was bitterly criticised but she was not perturbed. The Indian government had acknowledged her work by conferring her with the Padma Shri in 1962 and the Bharat Ratna in 1980.
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Writing in The Guardian, she described Mother Teresa as a “petty autocrat” and said that as a child she had hated her.
