It is with universal happiness that Mother Teresa’s impending elevation to sainthood is being greeted in India. In the many decades since the Albanian nun founded the Missionaries of Charity — after feeling a calling from God to care for the poor while on a train journey in India — Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu of Skopje, now in Macedonia, cared for the impoverished people of Kolkata’s slums in such an empathetic manner that she touched the conscience of the world. Her dedication to the poor, the sick and the dying in her trademark white sari was unmatched.
Impressed with her diligence and dedication, which fetched the Missionaries of Charity international fame and Mother Teresa the Nobel Peace Prize, the Vatican had fast-tracked her beatification, holding it in 2003, just six years after her death. Now that a second “miracle” she is said to have performed has been recognised by Pope Francis, her canonisation is to be held on September 4 in 2016 — the Pope’s “Year of Mercy”.
Mother Teresa had her critics, as in the Australian feminist Germaine Greer who accused her of foisting Catholicism on the vulnerable. But then proselytism has been associated from the early days with Christianity as much as with many other religions, and Mother Teresa was hardly its inventor. The late Christopher Hitchens faulted her for opposing contraception and abortion. But the sum total of her work in tending to the most humble and hapless is what puts her on a pedestal. We could not agree more with her being elevated to sainthood.
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