| Follow us on:
|
![Saint Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. Today, some 4,500 nuns work there [Xinhua]](http://thebricspost.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/246548619_8-e1473003963470.jpg)
Saint Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. Today, some 4,500 nuns work there [Xinhua]
Addressing a crowd of tens of thousands in St Peter’s Square in the Vatican on Sunday, Pope Francis said: “I think, perhaps, we may have some difficulty in calling her St. Teresa: Her holiness is so near to us, so tender and so fruitful, that we continue to spontaneously call her Mother Teresa.”
India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj was in Vatican City to attend the canonization.
“We declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a saint and we enroll her among the saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole Church,” he said.
But he also had strong words for world powers that did not do enough to combat the poverty she herself brought before the international community as a crisis of modern times.
He said Mother Teresa was not afraid to lock heads with leaders who Pope Francis said were to be blamed for “the crimes of poverty they themselves created”.
Mother Teresa’s canonization took just 19 years, considered extremely quick in matters of the Catholic Church.
She was beatified by Pope John II in 2003 after two posthumous miracles were confirmed and attributed to her.
Mother Teresa was born in Skopje, which was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, later Yugoslavia, and now Albania, in 1910.
She moved to India in her early twenties and established the Missionaries of Charity organization in Calcutta which looked after the poor and homeless, and those sick with leprosy, tuberculosis, HIV and AIDS.
In 1979, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
