NT NETWORK
PANAJI
Various parishes in the state celebrated masses on Sunday in view of the canonisation of Mother Teresa by Pope Francis at the Vatican.
The Missionaries of Charity sisters took out a procession early Sunday morning and garlanded the portrait of Mother Teresa which was kept before the altar at Our Lady of Immaculate Conception Church, Panaji. In his homily at the special mass in honour of Mother Teresa, the parish priest Fr Cleto Pereira said, “We are delighted that Blessed Mother Teresa is being elevated to sainthood. We need to honour Mother Teresa by emulating her in bringing God’s love to the marginalised and downtrodden. It is all the more heartening that the canonisation takes place in the Jubilee Year of Mercy because Mother Teresa embodied mercy”.
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, the future Mother Teresa, was born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia. Her father, a well-respected local businessman, died when she was eight years old, leaving her mother, a devoutly religious woman, to open an embroidery and cloth business to support the family.
Agnes left home in September 1928, for the Loreto Convent in Rathfarnam (Dublin), Ireland, where she was admitted as a postulant on October 12 and received the name of Teresa, after her patroness, St Therese of Lisieux.
Agnes was sent by the Loreto order to India and arrived in Calcutta on January 6, 1929. Upon her arrival, she joined the Loreto novitiate in Darjeeling. She made her final profession as a Loreto nun on May 24, 1937, and hereafter was called Mother Teresa.
On September 10, 1946, on a train journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling, Mother Teresa received what she termed the “call within a call,” which was to give rise to the Missionaries of Charity family of sisters, brothers, fathers and co-workers.
Fr Cleto said on her first visit to the slums, she visited poor families and washed the sores of some street children. She cared for the sick and dying on the road. She also nursed a woman dying of hunger and TB.
On October 7, 1950, the new congregation of the Missionaries of Charity was officially formed as a religious institute for the Archdiocese of Calcutta.
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Mother Teresa expanded the work of the Missionaries of Charity both within Calcutta and throughout India. On February 1, 1965, Pope Paul VI granted the Decree of Praise to the Congregation, raising it to pontifical right. The first foundation outside India opened in Cocorote, Venezuela, in 1965. The Society expanded to Europe.
After a summer of travelling to Rome, New York, and Washington, in a weak state of health, Mother Teresa returned to Calcutta in July 1997. At 9:30 PM, on 5 September, Mother Teresa died at the Motherhouse. Her body was transferred to St Thomas’s Church, next to the Loreto convent where she had first arrived nearly 69 years earlier.
Mother Teresa and her sisters share their charisma of prayer, simplicity, sacrifice and humble works of love with the poor and the abandoned by society.
Mother Teresa’s life was not without controversy. She was wrongly accused of having an ulterior motive of converting people to Christianity. Questions were also raised about her financial sources etc. Mother Teresa said nothing about her critics but went on doing her work for Christ. This was her commitment to Jesus as a disciple.