Many parishes, churches and groups came forward to express their happiness as Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint at a Sunday morning Mass in Vatican.
Advertisement
We could have watched the canonization celebration back in Australia too but we chose to be here in Calcutta at mother Teresa’s house to mark this iconic day as we wanted to feel the closeness to her said Mark & Synthia of Australia.
An estimated 120,000 people attended the Mass, according to the Vatican Press Office.
In honor of the new saint’s life long mission, organizers bussed in 15 hundred homeless people.
A throng of faithful crowds St. Peter’s Square for Pope Francis’ Mass for Mother Teresa.
Cardinal Angelo Amato read a brief biography of Mother Teresa’s work and then asked the Pope to canonize her in the name of the Church. She was “a generous dispenser of divine mercy”.
“Her talk really reached all of us to see the great things that this small woman has accomplished”, Elaine Lucious of Bloomsburg said.
“Mother Teresa gave up her privileged position and all her possessions to live as one of the world’s poor and forgotten and to bring them the light of Christ and the love of God”, Gomez wrote.
The declaration took place on Sunday, 19 years after her death.
Francis’ predecessor Pope John Paul II bent Vatican rules to fast-track Mother Teresa to sainthood two years after she died in 1997.
Mother Teresa worked with the poor in Kolkata for almost four decades, having initially come to eastern India as a missionary teacher with Ireland’s Loreto order.
After contracting tuberculosis, she was sent to rest in Darjeeling. In 1946, she received what she described as a “call within a call” to found a new order dedicated to caring for the most unloved and unwanted, the “poorest of the poor”.
Advertisement
Mother’s statue at Mother house Nuns of Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata during special thanks giving mass on the occasion of Nobel prize victor Mother Teresa canonisation programme at Vatican City today, in Kolkata on September 04, 2016.
