Under a clear sky tinged with the same purplish blue that runs in a band round the saris worn by the sisters of Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul yesterday beatified the diminutive nun who he said chose to be ”not just the least, but to be the servant of the least”.
Police in Rome estimated that 300 000 people had gathered for the ceremony, and they spilled out of St Peter’s Square down the broad Via della Conciliazione which stretches to the Tiber: Nigerians in flamboyant robes, Americans in iridescent baseball caps, and Korean women in long, traditional candy-bright dresses. Rarely has even the Vatican played host to such a multi-ethnic crowd.
Beatification requires evidence of a miracle, and at yesterday’s ceremony the Pope gave communion to an Indian woman, Monica Besra, who claimed that a tumour had shrunk after she prayed to Mother Teresa on the first anniversary of the nun’s death.
The gynaecologist who treated Besra said earlier this month that the tumour was, in fact, a tubercular abdominal cyst which had been cured by drugs.
Scepticism, though, was the last thing on the minds of those assembled in St Peter’s Square to honour a woman who unites many Roman Catholics of all persuasions in admiration of her self-denial in the cause of the poor.
”When nobody thought about us, she was there,” said Father Orson Wells, the priest of St Teresa of Avila parish in Calcutta. Alongside him were young men who had helped Mother Teresa at her hospice.
Joachim Ranjan Gomes said he remembered best ”her smile and her eyes, because her eyes carried an enthusiasm that was infectious, and her smile gave you a feeling of joy”.
The Missionaries of Charity, the order launched by Mother Teresa in 1950, now has 4 500 nuns in 133 countries.
Sister Joan from Malta, who works in Taiz, Yemen, where the Missionaries of Charity went to minister to leprosy sufferers, called yesterday’s ceremony a ”festival of hope and light”.
It brought to a climax weeks of mounting Mother Teresa fever in a city that has never had difficulty turning spiritual passion into hard cash.
Street vendors have been offering Mother Teresa mementoes, including fridge magnets. Audiences have flocked to a rock musical about her life in which a chorus line of sick and disabled people springs to its feet, tossing away crutches, as Mother Teresa sings: ”You can cure yourself with perseverance.”
From today, a phial of her blood will be on display — along with other relics — in the church of St John the Lateran.
Beatification is one stop short of sainthood and allows, but does not oblige, Catholics to worship the subject. In order to beatify Mother Teresa, the pope ignored the established practice of waiting for five years after a candidate’s death before starting the process of investigation and assessment, which is carried out by a special Vatican ”ministry”. He had thought of canonising her straight away, but was talked out of it by his most senior advisers.
Mother Teresa is not without her critics. She has been lambasted for discouraging birth control in a country burdened by overpopulation, and for opposing abortion even for rape victims. She accepted an award from Haiti’s sinister dictator, Jean-Claude ”Baby Doc” Duvalier, and cash that had been embezzled by rich benefactors.
Above all, she has been criticised for being interested solely in tending, rather than attempting to cure, the dying.
Pope John Paul, though, has never for a moment wavered in his veneration of a woman he said yesterday ”I always felt was at my side”.
Mother Teresa, who died in 1997 at the age of 87, was an ethnic Albanian from Skopje in what is now Macedonia. Among those who attended her beatification were the presidents of Albania and Macedonia, Alfred Moisiu and Boris Trajkovski, and the French prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin.
The less illustrious included Kimoi Mansing from Port of Spain, Trinidad, who flew to Rome because of her respect for the nuns of Mother Teresa’s order, who run a home on the island for children with disabilities.
”They are people nobody wants,” she said. ”Some of them suffer from hydrocephalus, so they have these huge, deformed heads. When I go and I see how they hug them I feel very humbled. I ask myself whether I am really prepared to do all that is needed to live out Christianity.”
No one could be found who had any problems with the idea of miracles.
”God continues to exist, so there have to be miracles,” said Doris Lobo, from Alajuela province in Costa Rica.
But did Mother Teresa really bring about a miracle?
”She gave hope to the hopeless,” said Sophia Ankrah from London. ”That’s a miracle.” – Guardian Unlimited Â