Mother Teresa to be a saint September 4

Mother Teresa will be made a saint on September 4, Pope Francis announced at the Vatican on Tuesday, 19 years after the death of the Nobel laureate who spent 45 years serving the poor and sick on the streets of Kolkata.

“Pope Francis today approved Mother Teresa’s elevation to sainthood and set September 4 as the date for her canonisation,” said a Vatican message to Mother’s House, headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata.

Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity and spent 45 years serving the poor, the sick, the orphaned, and the dying on the streets of Kolkata. She died at the age of 87 in Kolkata in 1997.

The elevation of Mother Teresa to sainthood came after the Church recognised a second miracle earlier, the Missionaries of Charity said. “We have now received an official confirmation from the Vatican that Pope Francis has approved Mother’s sainthood and set September 4 as the date for her canonisation. We are very excited and happy about it,” Missionaries of Charity spokesperson Sunita Kumar told PTI.

Archbishop Thomas D’Souza said that the canonisation was a formality but an important one. The Missionaries of Charity and Christian associations in Kolkata are planning a big thanksgiving Holy Mass on October 2 at the Netaji Indoor Stadium in Kolkata.

Nuns at the Missionaries of Charity said the canonisation in Rome will have a special universal significance because of Mother Teresa’s worldwide popularity. Sister Prema and Archbishop D’Souza will go to Rome to attend the canonisation. Over 300,000pilgrims went to Rome in 2003 for Mother Teresa’s beatification — the first step towards sainthood.

Mother Teresa was born Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu of Albanian parents in Macedonia in 1910 in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. After living in Macedonia for some 18 years, she moved to Ireland and then to India, where she lived for most of her life. She was granted Indian citizenship in 1951 and received a state funeral after her death in 1997. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India honoured her with the Bharat Ratna in 1980.

To some, however, Mother Teresa was a controversial and divisive figure, with critics branding her a religious imperialist whose fervent opposition to birth control and abortion ran contrary to the interests of the communities she claimed to serve.

Despite posthumously published letters revealing that she suffered crisis of faith all her life, Mother Teresa has been fast-tracked to canonisation in unusually quick time, underlining her status as a modern-day icon of Catholicism.

She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003 after the recognition of a claim that she had posthumously inspired the 1998 healing of a critically-ill Bengali tribal woman. In 2015, she was credited by Vatican experts with having inspired the 2008 recovery of a Brazilian man suffering from multiple brain tumours, thus meeting the Church’s standard requirement for sainthood of having been involved in two certifiable miracles.

Pope Francis, who regards Mother Teresa as the incarnation of the kind of Church he wants to lead, met the by-then internationally famous nun three years before her death, when he was still a bishop in Argentina.

He had later joked that she had seemed so formidable he “would have been scared if she had been my Mother Superior”.