VATICAN CORNER

Pope Francis has approved the second miracle attributed to the intercession of the blessed Mother Teresa, recognizing her miraculous cure of a Brazilian man with multiple tumors. The man’s parish priest had prayed to the Blessed Mother for a cure. After Mother Teresa’s death at the age of 87, in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, India, work immediately began on her cause for beatification. She was beatified in 2003 by Pope John Paul II after the first miracle was attributed to her. She answered a young Indian woman’s prayers to cure her brain tumor. So now it is official, Mother Teresa will be made a saint on September 4, 2016 at a canonization ceremony at the Vatican. She was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910. Her hometown was Skopje, part of the Ottoman Empire, but now it is the capital of Macedonia. As a child she was fascinated by stories of missionaries and was soon convinced that she should give her life to missionary service in the Church. She initially joined the Sisters of Loreto, taking the religious name “Teresa” and spent almost twenty years in that order, often in teaching positions across Calcutta. However, her life changed during a train trip in 1946. It was onboard a train from Calcutta to Darjeeling that she felt what she later described as “Call within the call.” She had long been concerned about the terrible poverty in Calcutta and suddenly felt called to serve those poorest of the poor and to live alongside them while she ministered to them. To that end, after receiving basic medical training, she opened her first school in 1949. One year later, she received authorization from the Vatican to found a new religious order, the Missionaries of Charity. From that small beginning, the Missionaries have grown into an order with over 4,000 sisters managing hospitals, shelters, orphanages and schools across the world. She was not afraid of putting herself in harm’s way in order to help those around her. She famously brokered a temporary ceasefire between Israeli troops and Palestinian fighters during the 1982 siege of Beirut to allow 37 children to be rescued from a hospital at the frontline of the warzone. Mother Teresa has been hailed globally for her works of mercy and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She accepted the award but asked that a gala dinner be cancelled so that the money could be used instead on the poor of Calcutta. Pope Francis, who has made outreach to the poor a priority for the Catholic Church, met Mother Teresa more than two decades ago while he was Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina. He is known for admiring her ministry as well as her fearlessness in speaking out on behalf of society’s outcasts. He once joked “I would have been afraid to have had her as my superior, since she was so tough.”

to be continued … Sources: news.va, usatoday.com, mothertereas.org, ncregister.com, nobelprize.org