"I would say, in listening to the charges from the judge, who's, as you know, very conflicted, and corrupt, because of the conflicting, very very corrupt, Mother Teresa could not beat the charges," Trump told reporters after jurors began deliberating in his criminal hush-money trial

Social media reactions were predictable. One commentator remarked that "although both Mother Teresa and Trump were born to human parents and had all the hallmarks of the Homo sapiens species, the similarities might end there."

Trump did not reply when a reporter asked if he was holier than Mother Teresa. Read more

The orphanage was shut down 16 months ago as police began probing baby-selling charges against the nuns.

The orphanage is attached to a care centre the nuns run for unwed mothers.

The government closed the orphanage after police arrested Sister Concilia Baxla on charges of selling a baby for money.

The 22 children in the children's' home were moved to government shelter homes.

Sister Baxla, 62, was released on bail on September 27.

However, soon after her release two similar cases of baby-selling were filed against the nuns' centre; the latest in November.

Police continue to investigate.

Father Anand David Xalxo, spokesperson of Ranchi Archdiocese said the nuns are ready to help the needy and reopen the orphanage.

However, "We need more clarification from the government before we reopen the shelter home," he told ucanews on Nov. 25.

"On one hand, the government wants us to start adoption, and on the other police file false cases against the nuns, with stinging allegations such as child trafficking".

"How can we function under such circumstances?" he asked.

The state's Child Welfare Committee request to reopen the orphanage comes a week after Auxiliary Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas of Ranchi intervened seeking federal investigation of the committee's role in the alleged cases of baby selling.

Mascarenhas said the nuns gave all three babies for adoption with the consent of the Child Welfare Committee and complied with all rules and regulations.

He says they also have documents to prove it.

The bishop wanted police to investigate the Child Welfare Committee, not the nuns.

"The nuns did everything as per the law and approval of the Child Welfare Committee. But the officials of the government body are spared and only the nuns are being harassed".

"We need to know the truth," he said.

Mascarenhas also sought the whereabouts of 22 children forcefully taken away from the nun's care last year.

Child Welfare Committee chairperson Rupa Verma said the government agency was facing problems to shelter children of single parents and it wants the shelter to reopen.

With an election underway, the Christian vote is seen as crucial for the electoral success of the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party; the party collaborating with Christians in social projects.

Source

• UCANews

Dr Gëzim Alpion, who is based in the Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology, writes how Mother Teresa's inability to come to terms with her father's poisoning by Slavic nationalists when she was nine in 1919, her brother's association with Benito Mussolini's Fascist army, and her concern about the safety of her mother and sister in communist Albania post 1945 explain why she never spoke about her private life and family.

Alpion suggests Mother Teresa's ‘dark night of the soul' determined all her decisions, including entering the religious life, choosing India as her destination, leaving the Loreto order, setting up her Missionaries of Charity congregation, and expanding her work outside of India from 1967 onwards.

To illustrate the last point, Alpion claims that her projects in Australia in 1969 began as another desperate attempt to get rid of her spiritual desolation at a time when she was realising that this was an incurable condition.

Dr Gëzim Alpion says: "Mother Teresa entered the religious life and chose India as her destination not simply or primarily to serve the poor but in the hope that, through them, she would discover the elusive God as well as to get rid of her dark night of the soul.

Her devotion to the poor was unwavering and genuine to the end.

The poor, the members of her religious congregation, and her volunteers, however, were ‘tools' that she employed to cleanse her own ‘dark night of the soul'."

"Contrary to the claims made by her hagiographers, Mother Teresa's spiritual aridity did not begin in the wake of the foundation of her congregation in 1950 but during 1919 to 1922 by which time she lost her father and eight close relatives.

The ever presence of death in her early years had a lifelong traumatic impact on her spirituality and relationship with family members, her nation and especially vulnerable people. Mother Teresa was never cured of her doubts about God; nonetheless, she always held sacred the dignity of every human being."

Some of these findings are included in Alpion's latest study titled ‘Why are modern celebrity icons absent in celebrity studies?', which has just been published in Celebrity Studies Journal (Routledge). Alpion finds the sidelining of spiritual personalities in celebrity studies a bizarre situation given that the proliferation and ubiquity of celebrity culture have led some scholars to approach this modern phenomenon as a form of religion as well as because, like everything else, religion has been affected by celebrity culture.

In this study Alpion announces for the first time the existence of a hitherto unknown member of Mother Teresa's family in Australia, a first cousin who was adopted by the nun's mother as an orphan at the age of six, something he initially discovered during a visit to Melbourne in 2011.

Since then Alpion has been using the information from this and other new sources to write the study, provisionally titled Rooting Mother Teresa: The Saint and Her Nation, a monograph which will be published by the end of 2019. Next year, Alpion will complete a book about Mother Teresa's forgotten sister in Australia.

In his acclaimed 2007 monograph Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity? Alpion argued for the first time that her spirituality and ministry should be explored in the context of the lifelong impact of her ethnic and familial background, a theme that is central to his aforementioned work in progress.

Mother Teresa, also known in the Roman Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was the Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary, born in Skopje (now the capital of Macedonia) in 1910, then part of the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. After living in Macedonia for eighteen years she moved to Ireland and then to India, where she lived for most of her life until she died in 1997.

Sources

• First published in Matters India
• Republished with permission.
• Image: Franciscian Media

They allegedly sold a newborn to a couple for about €1,500.

The three women have been taking newborns from single mothers and then selling them.

"We are completely shocked by what has happened in our home. It should never have happened," Sr. Mary Prema, superior of the congregation, says. Read more

Their role would be similar to that of the College of Cardinals and would offer more opportunity for women's leadership in the church.

Francis made Arborelius Sweden's first cardinal in a consistory on Wednesday.

He said he thinks "it's very important to find a broader way of involving women at various levels in the church."

"The role of women is very, very important in society, in economics, but in the church sometimes we are a bit behind," Arborelius says.

In this respect he has wide support, including from the female advisory board for the Pontifical Council for Culture.

Their wish is to send an "electric shock" that will open discussion on women's roles in the Church.

"The Church is a male-dominated world, but the [wider] world in which it exists is both male and female," Consuelo Corradi, vice rector for research and international relations at the LUMSA University of Rome, told Crux.

"The global church needs to enter a continued dialogue with women," she says.

Arborelius noted the church has in the past sought women's advice, and mentioned that Pope John Paul II had often sought counsel from Mother Teresa and Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare movement.

"Maybe it could be made more official," he suggested.

"We have a College of Cardinals, but we could have a college of women who could give advice to the pope."

The College of Cardinals is the body of all the cardinals of the Catholic Church.

Cardinals are usually senior Catholic prelates who serve as bishops in dioceses or in the Vatican's central bureaucracy and have a special tie to the pope as the symbolic heads of Rome's parish churches.

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• Crux
• Image: franciscanmedia.org

This does the saints a disservice as it dehumanises them; it does us a disservice as they seem too far removed from our own lives for us to imitate them.

David Scott's The Love That Made Saint Teresa is refreshing for this reason.

He ponders aspects of the life of Mother Teresa of Calcutta (as she is generally known) which are often glossed over, such as the 18 years she spent in the privileged surroundings of the Loreto Convent in Calcutta, during which she barely mentioned the misery beyond the convent gates.

"Her conversion to the poor came slowly," he suggests.

More extraordinary are the details Scott gives which have only come to light since Mother Teresa's death in 1997: her 50-year long dark night of the soul, and her initial visions of Jesus and His Mother in 1947 which led to her new vocation to the poor and the dying.

Although she destroyed her notes and diaries, a small cache of letters written to her spiritual directors during that momentous year reveals that for some time she resisted Jesus' explicit request for "Missionary Sisters of Charity, who would be my fire of love amongst the very poor - the sick, the dying, the little street children."

Jesus told her she was "the most incapable person, weak and sinful, but just because you are that, I want to use you for my glory! Wilt thou refuse?"

Mother Teresa describes how she disputed with this urgent request "and told [Jesus] to find somebody else, that she was frightened of the hardship and the ridicule she would have to endure. She promised to be a good nun if only he would let her stay put in her comfortable convent.

But he kept cajoling her, challenging her with the refrain: ‘Wilt thou refuse to do this for me?'" Continue reading

Sources

• Francis Phillips, writing for the Catholic Herald
• Image: Archdiocese of Brisbane

1. Speak as little as possible about yourself.
2. Keep busy with your own affairs and not those of others.
3. Avoid curiosity (she is referring to wanting to know things that should not concern you.)
4. Do not interfere in the affairs of others.
5. Accept small irritations with good humour.
6. Do not dwell on the faults of others.
7. Accept censures even if unmerited.
8. Give in to the will of others.
9. Accept insults and injuries.
10. Accept contempt, being forgotten and disregarded.
11. Be courteous and delicate even when provoked by someone.
12. Do not seek to be admired and loved.
13. Do not protect yourself behind your own dignity.
14. Give in, in discussions, even when you are right.
15. Choose always the more difficult task. Continue reading

I sought advice from Church figures and journalists, including my wife, Joan Frawley Desmond, who in those days was occasionally writing for the Register. What I heard was that Mother Teresa disliked journalists who portrayed her as a social worker.

It took a few phone calls from mutual Church friends to get the message through that I could do better. Finally, I received a typed letter from Mother Teresa asking me to be at the motherhouse, 54a A.J.C. Bose Road, on Dec. 16, 1988, for the interview. Her letter switched from the administrative to the evangelical in a few words. "Love to pray," she wrote at the end of her note, "feel often during the day the need for prayer and take the trouble to pray so that you do the work entrusted to you for his greater glory. Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God's gift of himself." With that, she signed off.

Kolkata is even more noisy, crowded and chaotic than you might imagine. But it's also an intensely friendly and warm city, once you get past the shock of arrival. I felt a little guilty staying in the comforts of the Oberoi Hotel, which was an oasis behind huge iron gates on Jawaharlal Nehru Road, a virtual river of life streaming through the city. My first stop was to see Father Edward Le Joly, who was an aged Jesuit from Belgium and longtime Kolkata resident. He had worked with the sisters for many years and had served as Mother Teresa's confessor. He lived in a simple residence, with no more than a bed, a desk, a mosquito net and fan — to beat back the city's dripping, relentless heat. Continue reading

• Edward Desmond is a former Asia bureau chief for Time magazine.

The late Catholic nun and missionary has been declared a saint, which requires a candidate to perform at least two miracles during their lifetime.

Mark Honeychurch from the NZ Skeptics Society says the two supposed miracles that led the way to Teresa's sainthood are lacking in evidence. Continue reading

The home was a lovely house located in a ritzy upper class neighborhood, complete with a white picket fence and a classy front door. I was only 21 and I had only been Catholic for a few months, but I knew enough to wonder how a house like this wound up as a shelter for one of the most austere religious orders in the world.

Soon after I settled in, I found out that the house had been given to the Missionaries of Charity by Princess Diana — or something of the sort. She had worked with Mother Teresa to found the shelter, a pro-life home for pregnant women seeking to adopt their children rather than abort them.

Princess Diana? I remember thinking. Isn't she over in Wales? What would royalty have to do with a tiny, wrinkly, homey nun that owns ten things to her name - at best?

The short of it is that Mother Teresa cherished a profound and touching relationship with Princess Diana. Fascinatingly, Mother Teresa died only six days after Princess Diana had been killed in a car accident in 1997.

Immediately after Diana's death, Mother sent a condolence message that said, "She was very concerned for the poor. She was very anxious to do something for them, and it was beautiful. That is why she was close to me."

Over the years, the two iconic women met with each other from time to time. They once held a meeting at a convent in New York. Mother Teresa left the meeting embracing the hands of Diana, who helped the frail nun down the steps onto the sidewalk.

In February 1992, at a Missionary of Charity convent in a working-class district in Rome, they prayed together. In fact, Princess Diana was buried with a rosary given to her by Mother Teresa. They were, apparently, dear friends, despite the fact that their lifestyles sharply contrasted one another. Continue reading

• Amanda Evinger is the grateful mother of three young children (and two others who have died), whom she homeschools with her husband Michael in a "little house on the prairie" in rural North Dakota.

Nearly 30 years ago, I worked at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington's emergency food warehouse. Missionaries of Charity sisters caring for HIV/AIDS patients at their Gift of Peace House in Washington, D.C. used to regularly stop by for food assistance.

Since I helped with food distribution, I got to know the sisters. One day while picking up food, one of the sisters said to me, "Mother is coming." I said, "Do you mean Mother Teresa?" She said, "Yes." I excitedly replied, "May I come?" And she said, "yes."

A few days later, standing in front of the Gift of Peace House with about 20 other guests, I saw Mother Teresa get out of a car and walk towards the house. Immediately the sisters affectionately ran to greet her.

Then, as we stood in a circle, Mother Teresa began to walk to each guest silently placing a Miraculous Medal of the Blessed Mother in each of our hands.

I remember she seemed to keep her head humbly bowed as she approached each of us. But when she reached me, I said to her "Namaste" - which is the normal greeting in Hindi.

Lifting up her head, and looking at me somewhat surprised, she greeted me back saying "Namaste."

Then I said to her in Hindi, "Kaise hain?" Inquiring, how are you? And she replied, "Theek" which means OK.

Having exhausted my Hindi vocabulary, my brief encounter with Mother Teresa of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) had ended. But the personal experience of conversing with a living saint continues to spiritually enrich my life to this day.

In a few days, on Sept 4, Pope Francis will canonize Mother Teresa - officially designating her as one of the saints of the Catholic Church.

Imperfect like all of us, yet holier than the vast majority of us, Mother Teresa truly exemplified what it means to pick up one's cross and follow Jesus.

And what a heavy cross she carried. Leaving the comfort of her convent, she ventured out into the slums of Calcutta with practically nothing, to care for the poorest of the poor - the unloved, the starving, the homeless, the stigmatized victims of leprosy, the abandoned and forgotten, the dying and the unborn.

In her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Mother Teresa said "I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing … if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you kill me - there is nothing between."

She went on to speak about a man she and her sisters picked up from the gutter. With worms eating away at him, they brought him back to their home and cared for him. He said, "I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for."

There is an excellent new DVD titled "The Letters: The Untold Story of Mother Teresa" (see: http://bit.ly/2bv2mpM). This movie will inspire you and me to step out of our comfort zones for the sake of those who suffer, and for the health of our own souls.

Consider the power of this reflection from St. Mother Teresa: "I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things."

• Tony Magliano is an internationally syndicated social justice and peace columnist. He is available to speak at diocesan or parish gatherings about Catholic social teaching. His keynote address, "Advancing the Kingdom of God in the 21st Century," has been well received by diocesan and parish gatherings from Santa Clara, Calif. to Baltimore, Md. Tony can be reached at tmag@zoominternet.net.

And Auckland Bishop Patrick Dunn will lead commemorations as part of the 11am mass on Sunday at St Patrick's Cathedral.

More than a thousand people are expected to attend the Auckland Sunday morning commemoration.

People of many faiths are expected to attend including representatives from the Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic faiths.

The five Auckland-based nuns of Mother Teresa's Order, The Missionaries of Charity will also be there.

An inter-faith committee (see below) is also planning an event in November at St Paul's College in Ponsonby to celebrate her sainthood.

"Her work of loving service and care for the poorest of the poor in India knew no religious or cultural boundaries, and people of the world's great faiths honour her as one of their own," said Lyndsay Freer, spokeswoman for the Auckland Catholic Diocese.

"This has been evident in Auckland, when six years ago a unique inter-faith committee was formed by people of several faiths to arrange an annual event to commemorate Mother Teresa's legacy of service to the poor in India."

Mother Teresa visited New Zealand in 1973, where she was met in Wellington by the then Prime Minister Norman Kirk and Leader of the Opposition Jack Marshall.

In Auckland, she attended and spoke at a rally at Alexandra Park."

Source

• nzherald.co.nz
• aucklandcatholic.org.nz
• Image: ethniccommunities.govt.nz

It wasn't until after her death, for the vast majority of people, that this part of Mother Teresa's spiritual life was uncovered.

"It was a big discovery," a friend of more than 30 years, Missionary of Charity priest Fr. Vazhakala told the Catholic News Agency (CNA).

When Mother Teresa's cause for canonization was opened, just two years after her death in 1997, documents were found in the archives of the Jesuits in Calcutta, with the spiritual director and another of Mother Teresa's close priest friends, and in the office of the bishop, containing her accounts of the communications.

Fr. Vazhakala, who co-founded the contemplative branch of the Missionaries of Charity alongside Mother Teresa, said he has a document handwritten by Mother Teresa where she discusses what Jesus spoke to her directly during the time of the locutions and visions.

During a period lasting from Sept. 10, 1946 to Dec. 3, 1947, Mother Teresa had ongoing communication with Jesus through words and visions, Fr. Vazhakala said.

This all happened while she was a missionary sister in the Irish order of the Sisters of Loreto, teaching at St. Mary's school in Calcutta.

Mother Teresa wrote that one day at Holy Communion, she heard Jesus say, "I want Indian nuns, victims of my love, who would be Mary and Martha, who would be so united to me as to radiate my love on souls."

It was through these communications of the Eucharistic Jesus that Mother Teresa received her directions for forming her congregation of the Missionaries of Charity.

"She was so united with Jesus," Fr. Vazhakala explained, "that she was able to radiate not her love, but Jesus' love through her, and with a human expression."

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: www.thefamouspeople.com

The 95-cent stamp features a wrinkled but radiant Mother Teresa smiling in her blue-trimmed, white sari.

Overlaid on the design by Patrizio Daniele is another image of her holding the hand of a small child.

"Frail but equally determined in her vocation, Mother Teresa loved God and the church with great strength, simplicity and extraordinary humility, glorifying with her life the dignity of a most humble service," said the brochure announcing the stamp's release.

The Vatican Philatelic and Numismatic Office announced the stamp's release Aug. 5 and distributed initial images of it.

It will print and sell a maximum of 150,000 sheets of 10 stamps each.

It will be released Sept. 2, two days before Pope Francis officially declares her a saint.

The Vatican post office is considering a special postmark for the day of the beatification.

Source

• catholicnews.com
• cruxnow.com
• Image: image.catholicnews.com

On the 'near eve' of her canonisation Hindu fundamentalists claim the impetus for Mother Teresa's action was an attempt to convert people.

Mother Teresa is due to be made a saint on 4 September at the Vatican.

"They are known for making such baseless statements. This is nothing new," Bishop Theodore Masceranhas, secretary general of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, said.

Yogi Adityanath, a senior member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the Indian Parliament, told a Hindu gathering on June 18, "Mother Teresa was part of a conspiracy for the Christianisation of India."

"Christianisation has led to separatist movement in parts of northeast India."

Adityanath's comments were echoed by another Bharatiya leader, Subramanian Swamy, who says such views were not "isolated."

However, columnist A.J. Philip pointed out in Indian Currents a Catholic weekly, "Swamy does not know that, for a large section of Indian people, Mother Teresa is already a ‘saint of gutters.'"

While the disparaging comments against Mother Teresa made news headlines, a section of the media — including the New Indian Express — claimed the comments were part of an attempt by the Hindu fundamentalist lobby to dissuade the Indian prime minister from attending the canonization in Rome.

India's Foreign Minister, Mrs. Sushma Swaraj will lead the Indian government's delegation to the sainthood ceremony of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, on September 4 in the Vatican.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has also been invited by the religious congregation Missionaries of Charity to attend Mother Teresa's canonisation in Vatican on 4 September.

The decision to canonise her was announced in March by Pope Francis.

He has written the preface to a new book on Mother Teresa entitled "let us love those who are unloved" based on two speeches given by her in 1973.

Source

• National Catholic Register
• Vatican Radio
• The Quint
• Image: Pixabay

But the priest charged with overseeing her path to sainthood said that for him, one thing stands out above all the rest: her experience of spiritual darkness and what she described as feeling totally abandoned by God for the majority of her life.

"The single most heroic thing is exactly her darkness. That pure living, that pure, naked faith," Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator for Mother Teresa's canonization cause, told CNA in an interview.

Fr. Kolodiejchuk is a priest of the Missionaries of Charity Fathers, founded by Mother Teresa in 1989.

By undergoing the depth and duration of the desolation she experienced and doing everything that she did for others in spite of it, "that's really very heroic," he said.

Pope Francis recently approved the second and last miracle needed in order to declare Mother Teresa a saint, and has set the date of her canonization for Sept. 4, 2016 - the day before her feast day.

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu Aug. 26, 1910 in Skopje, in what is now Macedonia, Mother Teresa joined the Sisters of Loretto at the age of 17, but later left after she felt what she called "an order" from God to leave the convent and to live among the poor.

She went on to found several communities of both active and contemplative Missionaries of Charity, which include religious sisters, brothers, and priests.

The first community of active sisters was founded in 1950. An order of active brothers was founded nearly 20 years later in 1968. Then two contemplative orders came, one of women (in 1976) and one of men (in 1979). Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report
• Image: Fox 11

After hearing the "call within a call", Teresa only heard the voice of God once more before her death. She experienced what St John of the Cross described as the "dark night of the soul". She wrote frequently about loneliness, not hearing from God, fear of hypocrisy and doubts.

In one of the letters published after her death, she wrote: "Darkness is such that I really do not see - neither with my mind nor with my reason - the place of God in my soul is blank - There is no God in men - when the pain of longing is so great - I just long and long for God... The torture and pain I can't explain."

It is tempting to ignore this side of Mother Teresa, focusing instead on her selfless service of the poor and the joy with which it seemed she lived.

But to do so would be a mistake.

We naturally shy away from the harsher realities of following Jesus, not wanting to examine them too closely, unless we - ourselves - get infected. We want the Christianity that brings joy and laughter, not emptiness and pain. Yet, to refuse to engage with the reality that we will have times of being in the wilderness is dangerous.

Why?

There will be times of wilderness, whether we like it or not. We have all been there, or will be there, when we pray to God, earnestly seeking to hear from him and we get nothing. The heavens are silent.

These times might not last 50 years, but they are an inevitable part of the Christian journey.

The Bible tells the story of a man name Job, who was well acquainted with this silence. In his pain, he cried out to God, yet these cries were answered with a deafening silence for 37 chapters. But the story does not end there. He chose to hope in the Lord, despite the circumstances, and the Lord was faithful. Continue reading

• Florence Taylor is a Junior Staff Writer for Christian Today.

Affectionately known as the "saint of the gutter" for her unconditional ‎love ‎for the poor, abandoned and marginalized, Mother Teresa earned several international honors, including ‎the ‎Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. ‎

She was beatified in 2003 by Pope John Paul II after being attributed to a first miracle, answering an Indian woman's prayers to cure her brain tumor, according to the Vatican. One miracle is needed for beatification — described by the Catholic Church as recognition of a person's entrance into heaven — while sainthood requires two.

Francis officially cleared Mother Teresa for sainthood on Dec. 17, 2015, recognizing her "miraculous healing" of a Brazilian man with multiple brain abscesses, the Vatican said.

Five years must pass from the time of the candidate's death before an examination can begin. The pope can dispense with this waiting period. A bishop is placed in charge of the initial examination of the candidate's life. Once deemed worthy by the Vatican, the candidate is called a "Servant of God."

Continue Reading

The meeting, also known as an "ordinary public consistory," formally ends the process of approving a new saint.

Vatican observers expect that Blessed Teresa's canonization will take place on Sept. 4, the day before the 19th anniversary of the nun's death on Sept. 5, 1997.

Pope Francis approved on Dec. 17 a second miracle attributed to Blessed Teresa's intercession. The miracle involved the healing of a now 42-year-old mechanical engineer in Santos, Brazil, who was in a coma after being diagnosed with a viral brain infection that resulted in multiple brain abscesses.

The Albania-born nun studied briefly in Rathfarnham, Dublin, when she was 18 before moving to India.

Mother Teresa was conferred the title Blessed in Rome, Italy, on Oct. 19, 2003, after Pope St. John Paul II recognized the miraculous healing of an Indian woman with a tumour in her abdomen.

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu‎ of Albanian parents on ‎Aug. 26, 1910, in Skopje, in what ‎is ‎Macedonia today, Mother Teresa died in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, on Sept. 5, ‎‎1997.

Affectionately known as the "saint of the gutter" for her unconditional ‎love ‎for the poor, abandoned and the marginalized, she was awarded ‎the ‎Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. ‎

Sources

Catholic News Service
Vatican Radio
The Irish Catholic
Image: The Irish Catholic

This is an annual event held by The Mother Teresa Centennial Committee.

This year's meeting was held on November 21 at Christ the King Church, Auckland and saw the Minister of Ethnic Affairs, Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga, attending and addressing the gathering.

The Catholic Bishop of Auckland, Diocese Patrick Dunn also addressed the gathering and said that Mother Teresa's message of love is the most important to heal the world. Continue reading