December 18, 2015, Friday — Mother Teresa of Calcutta to Be Canonized in 2016
Blessed Teresa of Calcutta will be proclaimed a saint in 2016, the Vatican announced today.
The likely date of the canonization will be September 4, 2016, the day before Mother Teresa’s feast day as a blessed.
Yesterday afternoon, Pope Francis authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to promulgate a decree regarding a miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed Teresa (born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu).
The Pope’s approval came during a private audience with the Salesian Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
Mother Teresa was proclaimed blessed by her friend, St. John Paul II, on October 19, 2003.
In this way, a crowning gift of the Jubilee of Mercy will be Mother Teresa’s canonization by Pope Francis during this coming year.
(The following draws on an email sent out today by Father Thomas Rosica, a Canadian priest who assists the Vatican press office for the English language.)
Blessed Teresa, known around the world as Mother Teresa, was born August 26, 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Kosovo Vilayet in the Ottoman Empire, into a Kosovar Albanian family. She was foundress of the Congregation of the Missionaries of Charity and the Missionaries of Charity.
Mother Teresa suffered a heart attack 18 years ago, dying at the age of 87 on September 5, 1997 in Calcutta.
The day after she died was the date she had been scheduled to lead an interfaith memorial prayer service in Calcutta for her friend, Diana, Princess of Wales, who had been tragically killed in a car accident one week earlier.
Mother Teresa’s most famous work began in 1950 with the opening of the first Nirmal Hriday (Tender Heart) home for the dying and destitute in Calcutta.
Mother’s words remain inscribed on the walls of that home: “Nowadays the most horrible disease is not leprosy or tuberculosis. It is the feeling to be undesirable, rejected, abandoned by all.”
Though Mother Teresa left this world scene 18 years ago, this tiny nun made the news big time several years ago with the publication of her letters.
Many journalists, magazine editors, television newscasters and bloggers completely distorted the story with their sensational headlines: “Mother Teresa’s secret life: crisis and darkness,” or “Calcutta’s Saint was an atheist,” or even “Mother and the Absent One.”
Some commentators wrote: “She lost her faith and the Church rewards her for it.”
These people seem unaware that those who prepared Mother’s Beatification in 2003 cited the letters as proof of her exceptional faith and not the absence of it.
Mother Teresa tells us in those deeply personal messages that she once felt God’s powerful presence and heard Jesus speak to her.
Then God withdrew and Jesus was silent.
What Mother Teresa experienced thereafter was faith devoid of any emotional consolation.
Father Rosica writes: “Years ago, during my graduate studies in Rome, I met Mother Teresa of Calcutta several times while I was teaching her sisters in a slum neighborhood on the outskirts of the Eternal City. At the end of our first visit, she blessed my forehead before placing into my hands one of her famous business cards unlike any I had ever seen.
“On one side of the card were these words:
“The fruit of silence is PRAYER.
The fruit of prayer is FAITH.
The fruit of faith is LOVE.
The fruit of love is SERVICE.
The fruit of service is PEACE.
God bless you. –Mother Teresa.”
“I still carry that card with me,” Rosica wrote. “There was no address, phone number, e-mail FAX number, or Twitter handle on the card. Mother Teresa didn’t need an address back then. Today, we don’t need any of her contact information, as she is available to all of us in the communion of saints. Everyone knows where she is and how to reach her. She still has her hands full with our requests.”
For further information about Mother Teresa, you may go to this link: link.
Note: Pending confirmation of the date, Inside the Vatican plans to have a small pilgrimage to Rome for the canonization of Mother Theresa in the first days of September. For more information and to reserve a space, please email [email protected].
What is the glory of God?
“The glory of God is man alive; but the life of man is the vision of God.” —St. Irenaeus of Lyons, in the territory of France, in his great work Against All Heresies, written c. 180 A.D.
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