Hundreds of people watched the Mass on TV with joy at the Mother house, Kolkata.
Pope Francis on Sunday proclaimed Mother Teresa of Kolkata a saint, praising her for having taken in society’s most unwanted and for having shamed world leaders for the “crimes of poverty they themselves created.”
“We may have some difficulty in calling her ‘Saint Teresa, her holiness is so near to us, so near to us, so tender and so fruitful that we continue to spontaneously call her Mother,” Pope Francis said.
Pope held up Mother Teresa as the model for a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to find poor, wounded souls during a canonisation Mass at St. Peter’s Square that drew an estimated 120,000 people including 13 heads of state or government and hundreds of sari-clad nuns from Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity.
“Let us carry her smile in our hearts and give it to those whom we meet along our journey, especially those who suffer,” he added.
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.”
At the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity group that she founded in Kolkata, hundreds of people watching the Mass on TV with joy when Pope Francis declared her a saint. They gathered around her tomb, which was decorated with flowers, a single candle and a photo of the tiny wrinkled saint.
Vatican had earlier approved accounts of two miracles occurred as a result of prayers for Teresa’s intercession. 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.
In the second, approved last year, Brazilian Marcilio Haddad Andrino says his wife’s prayers to Teresa led to brain tumours disappearing.
Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910 to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje –then part of the Ottoman Empire, now the capital of Macedonia- Mother Teresa came to India in 1929 as a sister of the Loreto order. In 1946, she received what she described as a “call within a call” to found a new order dedicated to caring for the most unloved and unwanted, the “poorest of the poor.”
In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which went onto become a global order of nuns priests, brothers and lay co-workers.
She died in 1997 and was put on a fast-track for sainthood soon thereafter.