Mother Teresa Of Culcutta Is Declared A Saint By Pope Francis - PLUS Her Famous Quotes

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, known in the Catholic church as the “saint of the gutters” during her life, has been declared a saint of the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Francis, Sunday 4th September, 2016

Mother Teresa was an Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary. She was born Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu in August 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia.

The proclamation  took place 19 years after her death. She died on September 5, 1997 in India.

Tens of thousands of pilgrims packed St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican for a service to honour the nun, who worked among the world’s neediest in the slums of the Indian city now called Kolkata.

A Nobel peace laureate, her legacy complements Pope Francis’s vision of a humble church that strives to serve the poor. Her canonization is a centerpiece of his Jubilee Year of Mercy.

Standing under a canvas hung from St. Peter’s Basilica showing the late nun in her blue-hemmed white robes, Francis said Mother Teresa was a “dispenser of divine mercy”. That St Teresa had defended the  unborn, sick and abandoned, and had shamed world leaders for the "crimes of poverty they themselves created".

“For Mother Teresa, mercy was the salt which gave flavour to her work, the light which shone in the darkness of the many who no longer had tears to shed for their poverty and suffering,” Pope Francis said.

No fewer than 120,000 people attended the ceremony to celebrate the life of mother Teresa. Large TV screens were set up at Mother House in Kolkata where hundreds of Nuns watch the Vatican ceremony.

Although critics have sought to portray St Teresa as a sinner and a hypocrite, her supporters have been just as vocal in her defence, challenging those critics to live their lives the way St Teresa did, before they cast the first stone.

Mother Teresa founded a sisterhood that runs 19 homes. Some people noted a lack of hygiene in the hospitals run by her sisterhood.

 Critics say she did little to alleviate the pain of the terminally ill and nothing to tackle the root causes of poverty

She achieved worldwide acclaim for her work in Kolkata's slums, but her critics accused her of pushing a hardline Catholicism, mixing with dictators and accepting funds from them for her charity.

It often takes decades for people to reach sainthood after their death, but beatification was rushed through by Pope John Paul II. He put her on the route to canonization two years after her death instead of the usual five.

Despite the criticism, I believe she did a great job to be so honored.

Below are some of her QUOTES;

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them"

"There are no great things, only small things with great love. Happy are those"

"Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier"

"If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one"

"Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies"

"We can do not great things, only small things with great love"

credits: NAN, BBC