Mother Teresa Honored With Sainthood By Pope Francis  

Vatican City, Sep 4: Pope Francis on Sunday declared Mother Teresa a saint at a morning Mass, making her the model of his Jubilee Year of Mercy and in some ways his entire papacy.

Tens of thousands of pilgrims - rich and poor, powerful and homeless - filled St. Peter’s Square today for the canonization of Mother Teresa, the tiny nun who cared for the world’s most destitute and became an icon of a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to find lost souls.

For Francis, Mother Teresa put into action his ideal of the church as a merciful field hospital for the poorest of the poor, those suffering both material and spiritual poverty.

Throughout the night, pilgrims prayed at vigils in area churches and flocked before dawn to the Vatican to try to get a good spot for the Mass being celebrated under a searing hot sun and blue skies. Her heart, she gave it to the world, said Charlotte Samba, a 52-year-old mother of three who travelled with a church group from Gabon for the Mass. Mercy, forgiveness, good works: It is the heart of a mother for the poor.

While big, the crowds were not expected to reach the 300,000 who turned out for Mother Teresa’s 2003 beatification, thanks in part to security fears in the wake of Islamic extremist attacks in Europe. Those fears prompted a huge, 3,000-strong law enforcement presence to secure the area around the Vatican and close the airspace above.

Nevertheless, those on hand were jubilant to have made the journey - nuns, priests, volunteers, pilgrims and tourists clutching the coveted 100,000 tickets issued for the Mass. One group of 40 Indian nationals traveled from Macerata, Italy to honour a woman given India’s highest civilian and humanitarian awards for her work in the slums of Kolkata. Another group of 100 drove from Kosovo toting a banner that read: Mother Teresa: Pray for Us. In addition, 13 heads of state and government led official delegations while 1,500 homeless people invited by Pope Francis had VIP seats and were going to be treated by the pope to a Neapolitan pizza lunch in the Vatican auditorium afterward.

While Francis is clearly keen to hold Mother Teresa up as a model for her joyful dedication to society’s outcasts, he is also recognizing holiness in a nun who lived most of her adult life in spiritual agony sensing that God had abandoned her. According to correspondence that came to light after she died in 1997, Mother Teresa experienced what the church calls a dark night of the soul- a period of spiritual doubt, despair and loneliness that many of the great mystics experienced. In Mother Teresa’s case, it lasted for nearly 50 years - an almost unheard of trial.

For the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who spearheaded Mother Teresa’s saint-making campaign, the revelations were further confirmation of Mother Teresa’s heroic saintliness. He said that by canonizing 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. What she described as the greatest poverty in the world today (of feeling unloved) she herself was living in relationship with Jesus, he said in an interview on the eve of the canonisation.

Francis has in many ways modeled his papacy on Mother Teresa’s simple lifestyle and selfless service to the poor: He eschewed the Apostolic Palace for a hotel room, he has made welcoming migrants and the poor a hallmark and has fiercely denounced today’s throwaway culture that discards the unborn, the sick and the elderly with ease.

Today’s festivities honoring Mother Teresa weren’t limited to Rome: In Kolkata, where Mother Teresa spent a lifetime dedicated to the poor, a special Sunday Mass was held at the order’s Mother House. Volunteers and admirers converged on Mother House to watch the canonisation ceremony, which was being broadcast on giant TV screens in Kolkata and elsewhere.

Sisters of Charity volunteers planned to distribute food to the poor nearby after the ceremony, and community meals were being served across Catholic parishes in India today - a symbolic reference to Mother Teresa’s lifetime of service to humanity, said the Rev. Savarimuthu Sankar of the archdiocese of New Delhi. Let the example of Mother Teresa inspire all of us to dedicate ourselves to the welfare of mankind, said Indian President Pranab Mukherjee.

Ceremonies were also expected in Skopje, Macedonia, where Mother Teresa was born, and also in Albania and Kosovo, where people of her same ethnic Albanian background live. Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, 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 - identified by their trademark blue-trimmed saris - as well as priests, brothers and lay co-workers. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She died in 1997 after a lifetime spent caring for hundreds of thousands of destitute and homeless poor in Kolkata, for which she came to be called the saint of the gutters. St. John Paul II, her most ardent supporter, fast-tracked her for sainthood and beatified her before a crowd of 300,000 in 2003. (AP)