Pope Francis: Mother Teresa a saint

Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa a saint at the Vatican on Sunday, conferring the Catholic Church’s highest honor onto the diminutive nun who devoted her life to serving India’s destitute.

Her canonization drew to St. Peter’s Square an estimated 120,000 pilgrims, who could hardly hold back their enthusiastic applause as Francis delivered the formula for canonization, declaring “Blessed Teresa of Kolkata to be a saint.”

Francis praised St. Teresa, who founded the Missionaries of Charity sisterhood, as a “model of holiness” for volunteers around the world.

“She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity,” the pope said. “She made her voice heard before the powers of the world so that they might recognize their guilt for the crimes of poverty they themselves created.”

A huge portrait of St. Teresa hung in the portico of St. Peter’s Basilica as the sun brightened the colorful and musical celebration.

The ceremony marked the 19th anniversary of the death of St. Teresa, who was credited with her second miracle this year — the final hurdle on her path to sainthood — when a Brazilian man said he was healed of multiple brain tumors after praying to the nun.

St. Teresa’s canonization also is seen as the defining moment of Francis’ Holy Year of Mercy, during which the pontiff has emphasized ministering to the most disadvantaged of society.

In keeping with that theme, the Vatican bused in roughly 1,500 homeless people from Missionaries of Charity shelters across Italy to be guests of honor at the Mass and to take part in a pizza lunch served by nuns afterward.

Francis specifically referenced St. Teresa’s commitment to serving the unborn — a position that often put the nun at odds with progressives worldwide.

“Mother Teresa, in all aspects of her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, making herself available for everyone through her welcome and defense of human life, those unborn, and those abandoned and discarded,” the pontiff said. “She was committed to defending life, ceaselessly proclaiming that ’the unborn are the weakest, the smallest, the most vulnerable.’”

Pro-life groups took the occasion to praise St. Teresa as a champion of their cause.

“That tiny nun, famous for her work with the extreme poor in India, has become a household name, synonymous with selflessness, goodness and charity,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, said in a statement. “But not everyone knows that Mother Teresa was a giant in the fight for life.”

Maureen Ferguson, senior policy adviser for the Catholic Association, echoed those sentiments, highlighting St. Teresa’s “radical respect for human dignity.”

“Her canonization is a reminder of her call to see the face of God in every person, especially the most fragile among us, the poor, the unborn, the elderly and the infirm,” Ms. Ferguson said in a statement.

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910 in what is now Macedonia (then part of the Ottoman Empire) to ethnically Albanian parents, St. Teresa arrived in India in 1929 as a sister of the Loreto order.

In 1950, she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which would go on to become an international network of nuns, priests and laymen dedicated to serving the “poorest of the poor.”

Recognizable worldwide by her meek figure and blue-striped white sari, St, Teresa served in the slums of Kolkata for nearly a half-century and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

She died in 1997 at age 87, and Pope John Paul II immediately placed her on the fast track to sainthood.

While big, the crowd attending the canonization wasn’t even half of the 300,000 who turned out for Mother Teresa’s 2003 beatification celebrated by an ailing John Paul. The low turnout suggested that financial belt-tightening and security fears in the wake of Islamist attacks in Europe may have kept pilgrims away from the Vatican.

Those fears prompted a 3,000-strong law enforcement presence to secure the area around the Vatican and close the airspace above. Many of those security measures have been in place for the duration of the jubilee year, which officially ends in November.

Francis acknowledged in an off-the-cuff remark toward the end of his homily that it might be difficult to refrain from calling the iconic nun — whom he described as the “emblematic figure of womanhood — Mother Teresa.”

“I think, perhaps, we may have some difficulty in calling her ’St. Teresa,’” the pope said. “Her holiness is so near to us, so tender and so fertile, that spontaneously we will continue to call her ’Mother Teresa.’”

• This article is based in part on wire service reports.