Pope beatifies Mother Teresa

VATICAN CITY:  Pope John Paul II, struggling to celebrate Mass but looking joyous, beatified Mother Teresa during a ceremony yesterday in St Peter’s Square — bestowing one of his church’s highest honours on the nun who cared for society’s downtrodden. In a shaky and halting voice, John Paul managed to proclaim Mother Teresa blessed, the last major step on the path to sainthood. But after stumbling through several prayers, he let aides read all of his homily, including a tribute to “this courageous woman.” Mother Teresa won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her charity work in India and elsewhere. She died in 1997. Police and Vatican security officials estimated the crowd at 300,000, one of the Vatican’s largest. After a night of rain, the sun was shining yesterday and thousands of tourists and Romans streamed toward the square even after the ceremony began. John Paul, wheeled in an upholstered chair across the front steps of St Peter’s Basilica toward an altar sheltered by a canopy, seemed pleased by the jubilant crowd.

“Brothers and sisters, even in our days God inspires new models of sainthood,” John Paul told the crowd. “Some impose themselves for their radicalness, like that offered by Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whom today we add to the ranks of the blessed. “In her, we perceive the urgency to put oneself in a state of service, especially for the poorest and most forgotten, the last of the last,” John Paul said, speaking in a slow and shaky voice. Nuns from her order wiped away tears and the crowd clapped when he pronounced her blessed. A poster of her smiling, wrinkled face was unveiled to the crowd from the facade of the basilica. A procession of Indian women and girls, whose white-and-gold coloured saris coordinated with the Pope’s resplendent gold-colored vestments, preceded a couple carrying a piece of cotton soaked in Mother Teresa’s blood toward the Pope. Beatification opens the way for public veneration, and the relic of her blood will go on display in a Rome basilica for a few days starting today. Parkinson’s disease  has stiffened the Pope’s facial muscles, and he no longer stands or walks in public because of hip and knee ailments. Sitting in his chair, he distributed Communion, including to one woman carrying a baby whose head he patted.

In his homily, read by Bombay Cardinal Ivan Dias and others, John Paul said he was “personally grateful to this courageous woman whom I have always felt at my side.” Another cardinal substituted for the Pope in saying some of the Mass prayers, further evidence of the Pope’s diminished stamina. After a week of several long ceremonies to mark 25 years in the papacy, John Paul faces another test of his strength tomorrow, when he is to lead a long ceremony to install 30 new cardinals. Hundreds of nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, the order established by Mother Teresa in 1949 to tend to the destitute, sang hymns with gusto. Front-row seats were reserved for VIPs, including Queen Fabiola of Belgium, royalty from Liechtenstein and Jordan, the presidents of Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo — in homage to Mother Teresa’s roots in the Balkans — and about 2,000 of the poor from shelters run by Mother Teresa’s followers, including one inside the Vatican’s walls.  Also attending the ceremony were Muslim and Orthodox Christian delegations from Albania.

Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian, was born in what is now Skopje, Macedonia. She spent most of her life working in India and established convents and homes for the needy around the world. In India, admirers wept with joy and prayed in her adopted hometown of Calcutta, and rallies, prayers and feasts were held across the country. People in orphanages and leprosy homes run by Mother Teresa’s charity and in hundreds of thousands of homes all over India watched the beatification ceremony beamed live from Rome. “This is an unforgettable day for us. We owe our lives to Mother Teresa,” said Rupak Biswas, a 34-year-old schoolteacher from Calcutta, who received free education at a school run by the Missionaries of Charity. The Pope put her on the fast track toward sainthood; breaking with the church practice of waiting five years after a candidate’s death before starting the often decades-long process of beatification, the last formal step before declaring someone a saint. Last year, he confirmed the required miracle for her beatification, the recovery of an Indian woman who was being treated for what doctors said was an incurable abdominal tumour. A second miracle is needed for elevation to sainthood.

In an interview with The Associated Press a few days before the beatification, the woman, Monica Besra, recounted how nuns from Mother Teresa’s order tied a medal with her image around her waist and prayed. The day was exactly one year after Mother Teresa’s death. “That day I fell asleep and I had a deep sleep,” said Besra, who embraced Catholicism after her recovery. “When I woke up, I touched my stomach and I found that the tumour was no more. And I felt light.” John Paul has stressed the importance of fresh role models for his flock in the third millennium, and three of those he has propelled along the path to sainthood were active in the latter half of the 20th century. In addition to Mother Teresa, an Italian mystic monk, Padre Pio, and the Spanish priest who founded the conservative religious organisation Opus Dei, Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, had huge followings among Catholics.