VATICAN CITY (CNS): Pope John Paul II offered his thanks to Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, founder of the Missionaries of Charity, for being close to him in her lifetime and for courageously showing the world what it means to love and serve Jesus completely.
“The venerable servant of God, Teresa of Calcutta, from this moment on will be called blessed,” the Pope said at the October 19 beatification Mass as the crowd burst into applause.
In the homily he wrote for the ceremony, the 83 year-old Pope said: “We honour in her one of the most relevant personalities of our age. Let us accept her message and follow her example”.
For the first time at a major event, Pope John Paul did not read even one line of his own homily. A Vatican official said that with the Pope’s difficulty speaking clearly, the crowd would not have been able to understand much of his message, so others were asked to read for him.
St Peter’s Square and the surrounding streets were a crush of some 300,000 pilgrims and admirers of Mother Teresa.
In an unusually personal homily, read by a Vatican aide and by Indian Cardinal Ivan Dias of Mumbai, the Pope wrote, “I am personally grateful to this courageous woman, whom I always felt was alongside of me’.
Mother Teresa was beatified in record time – just over six years after her death – because Pope John Paul set aside the rule that a sainthood process cannot begin until the candidate has been dead five years.
