Pope declares Mother Teresa a saint and model of mercy

Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint on Sunday, honoring the tiny nun who cared for the world’s most destitute and holding her up as a model for a Catholic Church that goes to the peripheries to find poor, wounded souls.

Applause erupted in St. Peter’s Square even before Francis finished pronouncing the rite of canonization at the start of Mass, evidence of the admiration Mother Teresa enjoyed from Christians and non-Christians alike.

Cardinal Angelo Amato, the head of the Vatican’s saint-making office, will read a brief biography of Mother Teresa and ask Pope Francis in the name of the church to canonize her.

Let us imitate Mother Teresa who made works of mercy the guide of her life and the path towards holiness.

Speaking in front of a large picture of the nun, Rev. Marijan Ristov said that Teresa dedicated her whole life to “God and human sufferings”.

“She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity”.

“She made her voice heard before the powers of the world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crimes of poverty they themselves created”, he said, repeating for emphasis “the crimes of poverty”.

For the newly-sainted Teresa, he said, “mercy was the salt which gave flavor to her work, it was the light which shone in the darkness of the many who no longer had tears to shed for their poverty and suffering”.

She was an example to volunteers around the world, he said.

English literature teacher Madhura Banerjee described her as an inspiration to the younger generation in today’s modern world.

“Mother Teresa belonged to Kolkata, and she has been declared a saint”.

In keeping with her spirit, he was treating 1,500 homeless people bussed into Rome for the Mass to a pizza lunch in the Vatican auditorium afterward.

Most of the Catholic Church’s saints or blessed people are honored decades, if not centuries, after their deaths. Traditionally, there is a mandatory five-year waiting period before formal evaluation of a candidate for beatification can begin.

Teresa rose to fame in the eastern Indian city, where she devoted her life to helping the destitute and the sick in its teeming slums.

St. John Paul II, her most ardent supporter, fast-tracked her for sainthood and beatified her before a crowd of 300,000 in 2003.

“I took doctors’ medicines, threw up and was in a lot of pain”. She helped me get well.

On Sunday, a second apparent miracle was acknowledged – the curing of a Brazilian man of a brain tumour.

Mother Teresa is revered as a model of compassion who brought relief to the sick and dying, opening branches of her Missionaries of Charity (MoC) order around the world. For Francis, Mother Teresa put into action his ideal for the church to be a merciful “field hospital” for the poorest of the poor – both materially and spiritually.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner’s path to canonisation was sealed after the Vatican past year recognised the second of two required miracles, following her death. “Mother Teresa?'” he told Reuters. And some doctors claim Besra was healed by modern medicine, not by prayer.

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. Her order has offices in Europe, Africa, the Americas and Australia, as well as Hong Kong and Russian Federation.