Tirana, Sept 13: Albania's government has announced a new national holiday on October 19 to mark the beatification of Mother Teresa, a government spokesman said. The year of Mother Teresa will also be organised, to run from October 19, 2003 to October 19, 2004, the spokesman said yesterday, describing the 1979 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize as an "illustrious figure of the Albanian people".
The blessed Mother Teresa, as she will be known, will be beatified in Rome on October 19 by Pope John Paul II only six years after her death - the shortest beatification process in the history of the Catholic church. Mother Teresa, whose real name was Agnesa Gonxha Boiaxhiu, was born on August 26, 1910 to an ethnic Albanian family living in Skopje, formerly part of the Republic of Yugoslavia but now capital of Macedonia.
After spending her childhood in Skopje, she left for Ireland at age 18 before travelling on to India where she founded a congregation of nuns in Kolkata and devoted her life to helping the poorest of the poor. Mother Teresa travelled to Albania for the first time in 1989 when she visited her mother's and sister's grave. Bureau Report