Pope declares Mother Teresa a saint at Vatican Holy Mass
Print Edition
POPE Francis yesterday proclaimed Mother Teresa of Kolkata a saint, hailing her as the personification of maternal love and a powerful advocate for the poor.
“We may have some difficulty in calling her ‘Saint’ Teresa’”, he said. “Her holiness is so near to us, so tender and so fruitful that we continue to spontaneously call her Mother.
“She made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime — the crimes! — of poverty they created.”
The unscripted comments came at a canonization mass attended by 100,000 pilgrims, including 13 heads of state or government and scores of sari-clad nuns from Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity.
Francis described Teresa’s work in the slums of the Indian metropolis as “eloquent witness to God’s closeness to the poorest of the poor.”
The joyful celebratory atmosphere in the Vatican was mirrored in Kolkata, where candles and flowers were laid on Teresa’s tomb at the headquarters of her order.
Francis also used his sermon to recall Teresa’s fervent opposition to abortion, which she termed “murder by the mother” in a controversial Nobel Peace Prize speech in 1979.
The ceremony came on the eve of the 19th anniversary of Teresa’s death in Kolkata, where she spent nearly four decades working in wretched slums.
With the 16th century basilica of St Peter’s glinting in the late summer sun, the 79-year-old Francis led a ritual mass that has barely changed for centuries.
Speaking in Latin, he declared “blessed Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) to be a Saint ... decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church.”
Among those in the front rows at the mass were 1,500 people from shelters run by the Italian branches of Teresa’s order. Later they were Francis’s guests for a giant pizza lunch served by nuns and priests.
Teresa spent all her adult life in India, first teaching, then tending to the dying poor. It was in the latter role, at the head of her now worldwide order, that Teresa became one of the most famous women on the planet.
Born to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje — then part of the Ottoman empire, now the capital of Macedonia — she was revered globally as a beacon for the Christian values of self-sacrifice and charity.
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