“It’s so wonderful to see her honored in this way”, she said.
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With hundreds of thousands of onlookers-priests, pilgrims, and tourists – crammed into St Peter’s Square in the Vatican Sunday morning to hear Pope Francis canonize Mother Teresa, the iconic Catholic nun whose name became a synonym for selflessness, charity, and administering to the needs of the poor and dying.
Speaking from the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica, Francis said St. Teresa spent her life “bowing down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity”.
He said that by canonising her, Francis is recognising that Mother Teresa not only shared the material poverty of the poor but the spiritual poverty of those who feel “unloved, unwanted, uncared for”.
In 2015, a decree was approved by Pope Francis, recognising a second miracle to her – the healing of a Brazilian man who recovered from a brain infection in 2008.
The Vatican announced Sunday it would give Neapolitan pizza to 1,500 poor and homeless people cared for by Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in the Italian cities of Rome, Milan, Florence, Naples and Bologna to honor the occasion.
Holding his seven-month old daughter Georgiana under the shade of an umbrella, Francis Gojcaj, an American of Albanian heritage, said Mother Teresa had “given her whole life to the poor”.
Her canonization is significant not only because it took place during the Jubilee of Mercy, but also because it fell during a special September 2-4 jubilee celebration for workers and volunteers of mercy, of whom Mother Teresa is widely considered one of the greatest of our time.
In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which went onto become a global order of nuns priests, brothers and lay co-workers.
In 1946, she moved to Kolkata to help the destitute and, after a decade, set up a hospice and a home for abandoned children. Let us pray in particular for the Spanish missionary sister, Sister Isabel, who was killed two days ago in the capital of Haiti, a country that has been sorely tried, and for which I hope for an end to such acts of violence and for greater security for all.
Her work complements Francis’ vision of a Church that serves the underprivileged. She died in Kolkata in 1997 at age 87.
We’re wiping tears of happiness away from our cheeks, knowing Mother Teresa’s kind heart has not been forgotten. “Mother Teresa was in India”. He and his wife Fernanda will attend the canonisation, which is considered the highlight of Pope Francis’s Holy Year of Mercy.
St. John Paul II, her most ardent supporter, fast-tracked her for sainthood and beatified her before a crowd of 300,000 in 2003.
Three years ago a study by academics at the University of Montreal concluded that the Vatican had ignored Mother Teresa’s “rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding … abortion, contraception and divorce”. Not only that, nearly one thousand five hundred homeless people and thirteen world leaders, including Queen Sofia of Spain, assisted.
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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. On May 24, 1931, she took her vows as a nun and chose to be named after Thérèse de Lisieux, using the Spanish spelling.
