After the mass, the 79-year-old pontiff boarded an open-topped jeep and toured around St Peters square and surrounding streets to a rapturous reception from tens of thousands of well-wishers.
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“Today was Mother’s Day at the Vatican”, I told a group of clergy, and
international human rights activists after the ceremony.
Mother Teresa twice visited Baltimore, first in 1992 for the dedication of a hospice for AIDS patients in East Baltimore and again in 1996 to visit the headquarters of Catholic Relief Services.
A special Mass honoring Mother Teresa on the occasion of her canonization in Rome was celebrated at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels by Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gomez. But she said the word “mother” also “feels very important”, if not quite equal.
Mother Teresa, who spent part of her life helping the poor in the Indian city of Calcutta, was born in 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia to an Albanian family from Kosovo.
Jaworowski, a lifelong Catholic from Pittsburgh who visited Chicago over the weekend with her husband, said the word “saint” is “extremely holy”.
The Pope said St Teresa had defended the unborn, sick and abandoned, and had shamed world leaders for the “crimes of poverty they themselves created”.
“Her testimony makes us reflect and transform.and make a better world”, Brazilian priest Carlos Jose Nacimento said.
That is when she decided she would leave the comforts of Loreto convent [her former congregation] to live with the poor. She started the order with 12 nuns and which now includes more than 5,800 people in 139 countries.
Mother Teresa is now Saint Teresa of Kolkata.
“I hope someday I will be like her”, said one person in attendance.
She received the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in 1979 and died in 1997 at the age of 87. As a young woman, she felt called to minister to the “poorest of the poor” in the slums of Calcutta.
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Behind the pope, on the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, hung a banner-size portrait of Mother Teresa, one of the late 20th century’s most recognizable faces.
