Saintsational! Mother Teresa’s day arrives in Kolkata

AS the Vatican prepares to declare Mother Teresa a saint, the city that witnessed her many good deeds celebrates her canonisation.

A nun holds a photo of Mother Teresa in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican one day before her canonisation in Rome. Picture: AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino

KOLKATA has strung up photos and posters of Mother Teresa, as industrious vendors set out figurines and glass-encased photos of the charitable social worker one day before her canonisation at the Vatican in Rome.

“We admired her because she did what we did not have the stomach for — tending to men and women whose limbs were stunted by leprosy, looking after children with lesions, comforting the dying,” writes Kolkata-born film director Sandip Roy in a commentary published by the National Public Radio.

A giant picture of Mother Teresa is displayed outside the Missionaries of Charity Mother house in Kolkata, India. Picture: AP Photo/Bernat Armangue

“We looked away when the beggar without hands knocked on the car window with his stumps wrapped in grubby bandages. Mother Teresa did not just look that beggar in the eye. She embraced him,” he adds, speaking from his experience as the child of a middle-class Kolkata family.

In the capital of West Bengal state, where Mother Teresa devoted decades of her life from the 1930s through to her death in 1997 at the age of 87, she has long been viewed as a saint in the eyes of the city’s impoverished, for whom the Albanian-born nun set up hospitals, orphanages and leper houses under the diocesan Missionaries of Charity Congregation.

At the end of the last month, the city hosted its third Mother Teresa International Film Festival to commemorate her birth anniversary on August 26, and the Mother Teresa of Kolkata Centre continues to promote her message to help others through its study and social work.

Pope Francis leaves St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. A ceremony held at the square is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of people to celebrate Mother Teresa’s sainthood. Picture: AP/Alessandra Tarantino

The headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church will make official her status of sainthood at the Vatican today, when she will be canonised in Rome in a ceremony recognising two miracles of healing accredited to her by the Church.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis is urging people to resist what “the temptation to indifference” to suffering in a speech on the eve of a ceremony to formally proclaim Mother Teresa a saint. Greeting thousands of lay volunteers from around the world in St. Peter’s Square, Francis overnight said that ignoring those suffering hunger, sickness or exploitation is a “modern sin, a sin of today”.

Today the square hosts a ceremony which is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of admirers of Mother Teresa, a nun who before her death in 1997, cared for the destitute who were dying in the streets of India.

Among the crowd were firefighters and volunteers who rescued survivors from the August 24 earthquake in central Italy.

Worshippers gather around the tomb of Mother Teresa inside the Mother house in Kolkata, India. Mother Teresa will be named a saint today. Picture: AP/Bernat Armangue