“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure
physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world
who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of
poverty — it is not only poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”
–Mother Teresa, A simple path (1995).
Pope Francis has announced that Mother Teresa will be named a saint on Sept. 4, 2016.Scores of mourners slipped past police to run beside the jasmine garlanded carriage that bore Mother Teresa to her funeral Mass in Calcutta on Saturday, eight days after she died of a heart attack at 87.
Mother, as she was known, was transported on the same gun carriage used in the funerals of India’s founding leaders
Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s wife, Aline, represented Canada at the state funeral, while Hillary Clinton represented the United States — both laying wreaths at the side of the open coffin in an indoor stadium.
To many, mere mortality seemed out of the question for Mother Teresa, the 87-year-old Albanian nun long hailed as a living saint for her ministry to the impoverished, the leprous and the dying in Calcutta’s teeming, fetid streets.
Even before her death at her convent in Calcutta, she seemed destined for official canonization by the Roman Catholic Church, for which she had become a wizened 20th-century icon.