✣ Mother Teresa to be canonised this year
What happened? Pope Francis has authorised the canonisation of Blessed Mother Teresa, after the Vatican announced it has recognised a second miracle attributed to her. Her canonisation is expected to take place on September 4 during the Year of Mercy. Earlier this month, the Archbishop of Calcutta announced that Pope Francis had confirmed that the cure of a Brazilian man suffering from multiple brain tumours in 2008 can be attributed to her miraculous intercession. What the media are saying The independent reported that, to her critics, Mother Teresa would never be a saint, arguing that her “saintly reputation was gained for aiding Calcutta’s poorest of the poor, yet it was undercut by persistent allegations of misuse of funds, poor medical treatments and religious evangelism in the institutions she founded”. But Tim Stanley wrote in The Daily Telegraph that the assistance she offered to the dying – companionship through suffering – was invaluable. “Even if Mother Teresa was flawed, her reputation has inspired wonders. Today there are thousands of her Missionaries of Charity in action, caring for abandoned children, those with HIV, lepers and the terminally ill. That someone is prepared to devote their life to help others is, in itself, a kind of miracle.” What the vaticanisti are saying In The Tablet Clifford Longley wrote that he could understand but not defend the Vatican’s announcement, saying it was a “very strange God” who allows miracles “in answer to prayers just to let us know that Mother Teresa is in heaven”, while ignoring the prayers of Jews during the Holocaust and others who have prayed in vain to be saved from murder or persecution. He pointed out that the cost of the ceremony would be half a million pounds and concluded that the funds would be better spent on the cause that Mother Teresa promoted: the poor. Fr James Martin SJ at Cruxnow.com picked up on a surprising angle of Mother Teresa’s life: that her closeness to God “evaporated almost entirely” and yet she remained faithful to her devotion to the “poorest of the poor”.
