INDIA: Thousands of people prayed and wept joyously at Mother Teresa's simple white-marble tomb in her adopted hometown of Calcutta in eastern India yesterday, to celebrate her beatification by Pope John Paul II in Rome.
Early in the morning nuns from the Missionaries of Charity Order which the diminutive nun formed in 1950, in their distinctive blue-edged saris, joined worshippers at their Mother's House headquarters in a poor part of the city, kneeling before her flower-bedecked marble tomb decorated with candles.
In the austere surroundings they touched their foreheads to the marble, before moving to a corner of the small enclosure to pray silently and to thank God for giving them the "Saint of the Gutters", a title bestowed on locally on Mother Teresa.
A bronze statue of the Macedonian-born nun in a corner of the room was garlanded with roses and marigold leaves were strewn at her feet. A special mass was held later at Mother House after the three-hour long beatification ceremony beamed live from Rome ended. It was avidly watched by inmates of hospices, orphanages and leprosy homes founded by the Nobel Laureate on television sets specially hired for the occasion.
"Let us thank God for giving us Mother Teresa of Calcutta," Father Joseph Maliyackal told the crowd of worshippers. "It's a day of rejoicing for all of us."
"Mother Teresa's motto was 'service to others', so any celebration has to be through prayer and service," said Bikash Khan, clutching a bunch of marigolds as he stood in a long queue of people lined up to place flowers around her three-foot high tomb.
"The honour being bestowed by Rome on Mother Teresa is long overdue," Dun Nana, a devout Hindu, said while making an offering of flowers at Nirmal Hriday, the hospice Mother Teresa founded in one of the poorer areas of this teeming city of over 15 million to give dignity to the dying who are brought in from the streets. An average of two people die here daily.
Celebrations to mark Mother Teresa's elevation - she will now be known as Blessed - began in Calcutta on Friday with a photo exhibition of her life. A film festival dedicated to her and other commemorative events will start early next month after the nuns and church officials who went to Rome for the beatification ceremony, return.
The Pope was such an ardent admirer of Mother Teresa's devotion to the dispossessed, that he placed her on the "fast track" to sainthood after she died in 1987. Beatification is the last formal step before sainthood.
Pope John Paul also approved the required miracle for the beatification - the overnight recovery of a 35-year-old tribal woman who was being treated for what doctors said was an incurable abdominal tumour. A second miracle is needed after beatification for elevation to sainthood. The Pope also waived the exhumation of Mother Teresa's body, essential ahead of the beatification, to ascertain whether it had decayed.
But some doctors and officials from the Science and Rationalists Association debunk the miracle attributed to Mother Teresa. "Miracles and medical science are hardly reconcilable," Dr Amiya Kumar Guha, a former radio therapist from one of the city's hospitals, said. Mother Teresa's beatification is a matter of religion and may align to miracles in the religious context. In no way can the spectacular be associated with prescriptions of medical science, he added.
"She [Mother Teresa] was a friend of the poor and this should form the basis for bestowing the sainthood. The miracle claim is all 'bogus, unfounded and not based on medical examination'," said Prabir Ghosh of the 17-year-old rationalists association which claims a countrywide membership of more than 20,000 and a mandate to free poor and illiterate Indians from superstition.