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Mother Teresa beatified
Vatican City, Oct 19: Mother Teresa, the humble nun known as the `Saint of the Gutters`, has been declared beatified by Pope John Paul II before hundreds of thousands of pilgrims massed in St Peter`s Square.
Vatican City, Oct 19: Mother Teresa, the humble nun known as the "Saint of the Gutters", has been declared beatified by Pope John Paul II before hundreds of thousands of pilgrims massed in St Peter's Square.
Mother Teresa dedicated her life to the
disinherited and the dying, loving and caring for those who
nobody else was prepared to look after.
She became synonymous with the people she called "the poorest of the poor" in the slums of Kolkata over more than four decades of her life devoted to others.
Her unselfish work would win the humble, diminutive nun the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 as well as trenchant criticism in some quarters over her dealings with some of her wealthy benefactors.
She accepted the Nobel Prize "in the name of the hungry, the naked, the homeless, of the crippled, of the blind, of the lepers, of all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared-for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone."
Her occasional critics felt she, in turn, should have shunned the notoriously unsavoury Haitian ruler Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, as well as the disgraced British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, both of whom donated generously to her cause.
She had set up her Missionaries of Charity order in Kolkata to help those "shunned by everyone" in 1950 and seen it spread from a small community to a huge multinational order by the time she died in 1997, at the age of 87.
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born to Albanian parents in Skopje, in what is now Macedonia on August 27, 1910.
At the age of 18, she joined the Irish order, the Sisters of Loreto, beginning life as a teaching nun at one of its sister houses in Kolkata.
But her life as a teacher ended in 1948 when she came across a woman dying in the street in front of a Kolkata hospital. She then chose to change direction and work with the poor in the city's slums, in time becoming known to a curious media as the "Saint of the Gutters".
She opened her first house for the dying in Kolkata in 1952, caring for and giving dignity to dying Indians found on the streets, where her new Missionaries of Charity, readily identifiable by their distinct blue and white saris became a fixture.
Five years later, they began their worldwide work caring for lepers.
Bureau Report
She became synonymous with the people she called "the poorest of the poor" in the slums of Kolkata over more than four decades of her life devoted to others.
Her unselfish work would win the humble, diminutive nun the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 as well as trenchant criticism in some quarters over her dealings with some of her wealthy benefactors.
She accepted the Nobel Prize "in the name of the hungry, the naked, the homeless, of the crippled, of the blind, of the lepers, of all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared-for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone."
Her occasional critics felt she, in turn, should have shunned the notoriously unsavoury Haitian ruler Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, as well as the disgraced British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, both of whom donated generously to her cause.
She had set up her Missionaries of Charity order in Kolkata to help those "shunned by everyone" in 1950 and seen it spread from a small community to a huge multinational order by the time she died in 1997, at the age of 87.
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born to Albanian parents in Skopje, in what is now Macedonia on August 27, 1910.
At the age of 18, she joined the Irish order, the Sisters of Loreto, beginning life as a teaching nun at one of its sister houses in Kolkata.
But her life as a teacher ended in 1948 when she came across a woman dying in the street in front of a Kolkata hospital. She then chose to change direction and work with the poor in the city's slums, in time becoming known to a curious media as the "Saint of the Gutters".
She opened her first house for the dying in Kolkata in 1952, caring for and giving dignity to dying Indians found on the streets, where her new Missionaries of Charity, readily identifiable by their distinct blue and white saris became a fixture.
Five years later, they began their worldwide work caring for lepers.
Bureau Report