Mother Teresa, famed throughout the world for her efforts to help the poor and discarded, was officially canonized as a saint of the Catholic Church on Sunday.
Pope Francis spoke before a crowd of approximately 120,000 that had gathered to hear the late Nobel Peace Prize winner declared officially as Saint Teresa of Kolkata.
“Mother Teresa, in all aspects of her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, making herself available for everyone through her welcome and defense of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded. She was committed to defending life, ceaselessly proclaiming that ‘the unborn are the weakest, the smallest, the most vulnerable,'” Francis said this weekend.
“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 this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime of poverty they created. For Mother Teresa, 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,” he said
The pontiff’s sermon continued:
Her mission to the urban and existential peripheries remains for us today an eloquent witness to God’s closeness to the poorest of the poor. Today, I pass on this emblematic figure of womanhood and of consecrated life to the whole world of volunteers: may she be your model of holiness! May this tireless worker of mercy help us to increasingly understand that our only criterion for action is gratuitous love, free from every ideology and all obligations, offered freely to everyone without distinction of language, culture, race or religion. Mother Teresa loved to say, “Perhaps I don’t speak their language, but I can smile”. Let us carry her smile in our hearts and give it to those whom we meet along our journey, especially those who suffer. In this way, we will open up opportunities of joy and hope for our many brothers and sisters who are discouraged and who stand in need of understanding and tenderness.
Saint Teresa of Kolkata was born Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910 in part of the world that is now called Macedonia.
She became a nun when she was 16, and then moved to to India in 1929.
She created her first mission approximately 20 years later, and founded the Missionaries of Charity, whose members can be identified easily by their iconic white-and-blue trimmed robes.
