For her, life was Jesus.
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Mother Theresa, who was originally named Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu, was born to Albanian parents in 1910, in the former Ottoman Empire (now Macedonia).
The saint was also honored in an afternoon Mass Sunday at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles where a new chapel dedicated to Mother Teresa was opened.
They congregated around Mother’s tomb, which was decorated with a single lighted candle, flowers and a photo of the tiny saint.
“I am so proud to be from Kolkata”, said Sanjay Sarkar, a high school student on hand for the celebration.
“I think, perhaps, we may have some difficulty in calling her St. Teresa: Her holiness is so near to us, so tender and so fruitful, that we continue to spontaneously call her Mother Teresa”, the pope said in off-the-cuff remarks during his homily.
Pope Francis is declaring Mother Teresa a saint at a Sunday morning Mass, making her the model of his Jubilee Year of Mercy and in some ways his entire papacy. Doctors who visited her field hospitals said she perpetuated suffering by denying patients pain medication and working more to convert the suffering to Catholicism than to cure them.
Most of the Catholic Church’s saints or blessed people are honored decades, if not centuries, after their deaths.
When Francis proclaimed her St. Teresa of Calcutta at the end of the formal ceremony, in Latin, the crowd erupted in sustained applause.
Francis praised St. Teresa as a “dispenser of divine mercy” and also someone who “made her voice heard before the powers of the world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crimes of poverty they themselves created”.
In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which went onto become a global order of nuns – identified by their trademark blue-trimmed saris, as well as priests, brothers and lay co-workers.
By the kind of coincidence St. John Paul always called “God’s Plan”, as I was leaving the Basilica, I encountered the Mother General of the Missionaries Sisters of Charities who came over to greet me. The low turnout suggested that financial belt-tightening and security fears in the wake of Islamic extremist attacks in Europe may have kept pilgrims away. Airspace above was closed.
Saint Teresa had several ties to Charlotte, including retired Bishop William Curlin, who was good friends with the Mother Teresa.
Francis has never publicly mentioned this “darkness”, but he has in many ways modeled his papacy on Mother Teresa’s simple lifestyle and selfless service to the poor: He eschewed the Apostolic Palace for a hotel room, made welcoming migrants and the poor a hallmark and has fiercely denounced today’s “throwaway” culture that discards the unborn, the sick and the elderly easily.
The Nobel Peace Laureate died in 1997 at the age of 87. Twenty Films, Documentaries and Short films showcasing the life and work of Mother Teresa would be screened at the Festival and similar festivals would be held in different cities in India and in about 50 countries around the world. One of the most memorable moments is when she made an unplanned visit to McKinstry Market.
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A tiny village in remote northeast India, the only place in Arunachal Pradesh state that St Mother Teresa visited some 23 years ago, celebrated the new saint’s canonization on September 4 with great fervor and enthusiasm. Achieving sainthood requires the Vatican to approve accounts of two miracles occurring as a result of prayers for Teresa’s intercession.
