World braces for Mother Teresa’s canonisation

The countdown for the canonisation ceremony of Mother Teresa where she will be declared a Saint on Sunday has begun.  A 12-member central delegation led by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and two state government-level delegations from Delhi and West Bengal led by Chief Ministers Arvind Kejriwal and Mamata Banerjee, respectively, will attend the ceremony.

Nuns at the Missionaries of Charity, founded by the late Nobel laureate nun, said the canonisation in Rome will have a special universal significance because of the Mother’s popularity.

A group of around 40-50 nuns from different parts of the country will be present at the ceremony led by Missionaries of Charity Superior General Sister Mary Prema. Besides Archbishop of Kolkata Thomas D’Souza, about 45 bishops from all over India are now in Vatican.

The Missionaries of Charity has organised various programmes at the Mother House in Kolkata to celebrate the occasion. Hundreds of people from across the state are expected to visit the Mother House on Sunday to witness the historic moment.  

The nuns and sisters who are attached to the Missionaries of Charity had seen Mother Teresa serving the poor and the ailing in the city for many years from a very close quarter and have been anxiously waiting to watch the ceremony on television. 

The city where the Albanian nun had worked for five decades and got Nobel peace prize in 1979 is all set to welcome the sainthood for Mother Teresa who is so dear to everyone’s heart.

It should be known that hundreds of people including many of the youngsters have already travelled to Rome to become a part of the historic moment by witnessing Mother Teresa being canonised.   

A spokesperson for the Missionaries of Charity, Sunita Kumar, said that the event would be celebrated through various programmes in the Mother House on Sunday. 

In March, Pope Francis had announced that the Mother, who spent 45 years serving the poor and sick on the streets in Kolkata, will be elevated to sainthood after the Church recognised two miracles attributed to her after her death. To mark the occasion, a series of events are being held in the city where the Mother lived and worked all her life.

Mother Teresa is most often associated with St John Paul II, who was pope during the heyday of her work. But Pope Francis seems more a pope in her likeness, eschewing the Apostolic Palace for a simple hotel room, focusing his ministry on the most marginal of society and traveling to the peripheries to find lost souls — just as Mother Teresa did.

At the Mother House in Vatican, a special mass will be organised and the nuns have promised to celebrate the occasion with the poorest of the poor. In 2003, Teresa was beatified by then Pope John Paul II in a fast-tracked process which is the first step to gaining Sainthood.

In 2002, the Vatican officially recognised a miracle she was said to have carried out after her death, namely the 1998 healing of a Bengali tribal woman, Monika Besra, who was suffering from an abdominal tumour. The traditional canonisation procedure requires at least two miracles.

The second miracle was from Brazil, where a person had been healed miraculously as a result of her earlier prayers.