Indian Church hails official feast day for Mother Teresa

Fr Stanley Kozhichira said Mother Teresa was universally admired by all people across the boundaries of religions and nations.  

Laity and clergy in India welcomed the Vatican’s announcement that the feast of St Teresa of Kolkata will be added to the universal liturgical calendar as an optional memorial.

The memorial of the saint – popularly known as Mother Teresa – on 5 September will now appear in the Church’s calendar and liturgical texts, with specific prayers and readings to be used at Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours.

“For us in India it is a very privileged occasion. We are very happy about it. Mother Teresa, known all over the globe as the ‘angel of mercy’, is our very own saint,” said Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore, vice president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India.

He told The Tablet it was right, in the Jubilee Year of Mercy, for Pope Francis to honour the international icon of charity, who was a beacon of hope, compassion and love for thousands of destitute and intellectually challenged, for the old, the infirm and the unwanted.

Responding to a “call within a call”, Mother Teresa left the Loreto Convent in 1950 and founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta – now Kolkata – the capital city of West Bengal state. Her congregation today has over 5,700 nuns serving in 139 countries.

The dimunitive nun, born in Skopje, Macedonia as Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, stood tall with her exemplary service to the “poorest of the poor” that won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and the sobriquet “the saint of the gutters”. She died at the age of 87 in 1997 and was canonised by Pope Francis in 2016. 

Fr Stanley Kozhichira, president of the Catholic communication agency Signis Asia, said Mother Teresa was universally admired by all people across the boundaries of religions and nations.  

Speaking to The Tablet, he explained that the Pope’s understanding of the devotion and love that people have for her all over the world led to him granting the requests to incorporate her feast into the universal calendar of the Catholic Church. Now the universal church fraternity feels closer to her, Fr Kozhichira said.

She was “an outstanding witness to hope for those who had been discarded in life,” said the theologian Virginia Saldhana, a former executive secretary of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conference’s office of laity.

The initiative shows Pope Francis’ high regard for the work of women religious in the Church, she told The Tablet. Her feast will also help to focus on the work and mission of the women religious in all parts of the world.

The gospel for the feast day is from St Matthew, including the verse: “Whatever you have done to the very least of my brothers and sisters you have done also to me” (Matthew 25:40). Fr Kozhichira said it was “brought wonderfully to life in Mother Teresa.

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