Vatican City: Pope Francis on Sunday 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,” the pontiff said. “Her holiness is so near to us, so tender and so fruitful that we continue to spontaneously call her Mother.” He added: “She made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognise their guilt for the crime - the crimes of poverty they created.”
With the 16th century basilica of St Peter’s glinting in the late summer sun, the Pope 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”. The unscripted comments came at a canonisation mass attended by 1,00,000 pilgrims, including 13 heads of state or government and hundreds of blue-white sari-clad nuns from St Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity.
Queen Sofia of Spain and some 1,500 homeless people also looked on as the Pope described St Teresa’s work in the slums of the Indian metropolis as “an eloquent witness to God’s closeness to the poorest of the poor.” To applause, the 79-year-old pontiff added, “Mother Teresa loved to say, ‘perhaps I don’t speak their language, but I can smile’.”
The joyful celebratory atmosphere in the Vatican was mirrored in Kolkata, where candles and flowers were laid on St Teresa’s tomb at the headquarters of her Order. Pope Francis also used his sermon to recall St Teresa’s fervent opposition to abortion, which she termed “murder by the mother” in a controversial Nobel Peace prize speech in 1979. She “ceaselessly proclaimed that the unborn are the weakest”, he said. The ceremony came on the eve of the 19th anniversary of St Teresa’s death in Kolkata, where she spent nearly four decades working in wretched slums.
Born to Kosovan Albanian parents in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman empire and now the capital of Macedonia, she won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize and was revered around the world as a beacon for the Christian values of self-sacrifice and charity. 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.
By historical standards, Teresa has been fast-tracked to sainthood. John Paul II was a personal friend and as the pope at the time of her death, he was responsible for her being beatified in 2003.
