Her elevation to Roman Catholicism’s celestial pantheon came in a canonisation mass in St Peter’s square in the Vatican that was presided over by Pope Francis in the presence of 1,00,000 pilgrims.
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Francis said that even though the nun has been declared a saint, she will always be Mother Teresa to the Catholic family.
India renamed the city of Calcutta to Kolkata in 2001 to match the Bengali pronunciation. NDTV reports that, shortly after hailing Mother Teresa “as the personification of maternal love and a powerful advocate for the poor”, the 79-year-old pontiff toured St. Peter’s square via open-topped jeep.
Two apparent cures of sick people after Mother Teresa’s death in 1997 have been attributed to her intercession.
The church’s newest saint won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
Pope Francis called Mother Teresa “a tireless worker of mercy” in a year he has proclaimed as a Jubilee Year to celebrate the theme of mercy. “She made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognise their guilt for the crime of poverty they created”.
Mother Teresa visited the small Alberta town in the 80s, and her missionary sisters are still there working with the First Nations community.
No fewer than 120,000 people attended the ceremony to celebrate the life of a woman who Francis said it might be hard to call “Saint” as people felt so close to her they spontaneously used “Mother”.
At this occasion, Sister Anna Maria Mendez said, “It’s so handsome, I was moved by Mother Teresa’s works, and moved by this ceremony”. In 1929, she moved to India as a sister of the Loreto Order.
Another parish, St. Ignatius Jacob circle distributed food packets among the poor and the needy.
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Most of those invited live in shelters run by the new saint’s order, the Sisters of Charity. Pope Francis described her as an “eloquent witness to God’s closeness to the poorest of the poor”. So I simply asked her what message she had for the people of the city.
