“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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Pope Francis is declaring Mother Teresa a saint at a morning Mass, making her the model of his Jubilee Year of Mercy and in some ways his entire papacy.
In Saint Teresa’s case, the first miracle happened after a 30-year-old woman in Kolkata said she was cured of a stomach tumor after praying to Mother Teresa.
“The crimes of poverty they themselves created”, he repeated again.
The unscripted comments came at a canonisation mass attended by 100,000 pilgrims, including 13 heads of state or government and hundreds of sari-clad nuns from Teresas order, the Missionaries of Charity. The ceremony, known as a canonization, drew an emotional crowd of nuns and pedestrians alike from around the world. “It is the heart of a mother for the poor”. “All of India is proud”, said Marina Borneo Sam, who traveled from the slum area of Kolkata with her mother for the ceremony.
She died on September 5, 1997, at the age of 87 and was beatified by the Holy See in October 2003.
Baltimore’s City Hall is being lit up in blue Sunday night, as ordered by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, in honor of Pope Francis’ naming Mother Teresa as a Saint.
The staunchly pro-life nun was not a stranger to controversy during her lifetime, when some criticized her for poor conditions at the clinics she ran in spite of millions in donations.
Mother Teresa was born in 1910 to ethnic Albanian parents.
“For me, nothing has changed”, said Giovanna Tommasi, lay member of the Missionaries of Charity, a religious order Mother Teresa founded in 1950.
In 1946, she moved to Kolkata to help the destitute and, after a decade, set up a hospice and a home for abandoned children. Setting up the Missionaries of Charity order, she chose to devote her entire life to the depriving masses.
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The foundation operates in 133 countries and by 2012 had more than 4,500 sisters working for it.
