The Hindu : `It is a beautiful day for Kolkata'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Oct 20, 2003

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`It is a beautiful day for Kolkata'

By Marcus Dam

Kolkata Oct. 19. The city's laity did it with flowers, the sisters of the Missionaries of Charity through prayers. That is how Kolkata, Mother Teresa's adopted home for more than half a century, celebrated her beatification, thousands of miles away from St. Peter's Square in the Vatican. "Mother loved Kolkata, Kolkata loved Mother. The celebrations are not for just today but for life,'' Sister Christie, a close associate of the Mother and spokesperson of the Missionaries of Charity, the order that Mother Teresa had found more than 50 years ago, told The Hindu.

"It is a beautiful day for Kolkata, for us and for the poor whom the Mother served. We thank God," she added, her voice choked with emotion and gratitude. Also thankful was Gopal Laha, a 56-year-old destitute who had been brought to Nirmal Hriday, the first centre to be set up 51 years ago by the Mother — a centre for "the dying and destitute," tucked away in south Kolkata. Now a home to 110 men and women, all of whom were given a special lunch and new clothes to honour the occasion, it had a much-revered guest in Pope John Paul II in February 1986 and who today was conducting the beatification ceremony of Mother Teresa in the Vatican.

Propped up in bed, a leg swathed in bandages, Laha peers up at the television set up at one end of the dormitory, as it beams live from Rome the ceremony at the end of which the Mother will be known as the Blessed Teresa of Kolkata — a step away from sainthood. "Our Mother is holy. She is to be a saint, we are thankful," Laha said. Glued to the giant screens put up at the Mother House, Sishu Bhavan, Shantidan and Dayadan set up in different parts of the city were nuns and sisters and the inmates — the poor and abandoned — watching the proceedings at St. Peter's Square. The congregation there included their very own nuns from the Missionaries of Charity who had devoted their years at these homes.

Even before dawn, the Mother's admirers and volunteers from different centres set up by the order, started filing in by the scores to the Mother House, the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity, in central Kolkata. Nuns and sisters congregated for prayers at a special morning mass, following which visitors were allowed to garland a life-size statue of the Mother in bronze and then pay their floral tributes at her marble tomb housed in the sanctum sanctorum that was softly bathed in candle-light.

The illumination was more extensive and elaborate at St. Thomas' Church where the Mother's body had been kept for some time after her death six years ago.

A special mass was held inside, as also at St. Teresa's Church, the parish the Mother belonged to. The celebrations spilled onto the streets during the day with a procession being taken out by parishioners from St. Mary's Church to the Mother House, making it a very special Sunday indeed for the city Mother Teresa called her home.

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`It is a beautiful day for Kolkata'