VATICAN CITY (AP) – Thousands of pilgrims are thronging to St. Peter’s Square for the canonization of Mother Teresa, the tiny nun who cared for the world’s most unwanted and became the icon of a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to find lost, wounded souls.
Advertisement
For numerous poor and destitute whom Mother Teresa served, the tiny nun was a living saint.
Mother Teresa’s legacy complements Pope Francis’s vision of a humble church that strives to serve the poor, and the festivities are a highlight of his Holy Year of Mercy, which runs until November 8. But he also said she confronted the “powers of this world” with “their guilt for the crime of poverty they created”. As if to emphasize the point, Francis repeated the “the crimes of poverty they themselves created”.
“For the honour of the Blessed Trinity. we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint and we enroll her among the Saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church”, the pontiff said in Latin.
Hundreds of Missionaries of Charity sisters in their trademark blue-trimmed white saris had front-row seats at the Mass, alongside 1,500 homeless people and 13 heads of state or government and even royalty: Queen Sofia of Spain.
But she was also regarded with scorn by secular critics who accused her of being more concerned with evangelism than with improving the lot of the poor.
Mother Teresa met Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton more than 20 years ago and spoke strongly against abortion, according to stories recently published by several publications.
The first one, ratified in 2002, was of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, who says she recovered from ovarian cancer a year after Teresa’s death – something local health officials have put down to medicine rather than prayer.
For the homeless, Francis offered a luncheon afterward in the Vatican auditorium, catered by a Neapolitan pizza maker who brought his own ovens for the event.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said her spirit and the respect she had for the worth and dignity of human beings inspired constructive efforts to do away with hunger and poverty.
“What she described as the greatest poverty in the world today [of feeling unloved] she herself was living in relationship with Jesus”, he said in an interview on the eve of the canonization.
Ansari in his message marked the work done by the Missionaries of Charity, established by the Mother in 1950 to serve the sick and the poor of Calcutta (now Kolkata).
Francis 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, he has 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 Rev. Vincent Druding, a priest from Church of the Assumption in Peekskill, N.Y, traveled to the Vatican for the canonization after making a personal pilgrimage to Kolkata to meet the nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded. She died in Kolkata in 1997 at age 87.
Kolkata will take a century to recover from Mother Teresa Cardinal Angelo Amato read a brief biography of the work of the Nobel Peace Prize victor Mother Teresa and then asked the Pope to canonize her in the name of the Church.
Advertisement
In a departure from his scripted remarks, he noted that people “may struggle” to refer to her as “Saint Teresa”.
