Mother Teresa sainthood hailed

CATHOLIC bishops yesterday welcomed the news from the Vatican that the late Mother Teresa was on her way to sainthood, saying her canonization would help teach Filipinos to be more compassionate to the poor.

“This is a great joy for us. She founded [charity] houses here and she exemplifies selfless service, which is an antidote to the corruption and greed in our country and in the world,” said Novaliches Bishop Emeritus Teodoro Bacani.

Malolos Bishop Jose Oliveros said the forthcoming canonization of the late nun was “great news” not only for the Filipinos but for the people all over the world.

“Mother Teresa is a living image of God’s mercy because she dedicated her life in the service of the poor and the abandoned. Let us ask her to intercede that we may also be the bearers of God’s mercy to those who desperately need his mercy,” Oliveros said.

The prelate also noted that Mother Teresa’s canonization would come at a time when the Catholic Church was celebrating the Jubilee Year of Mercy.

Lipa Archbishop Ramon Arguelles noted that Mother Teresa was close to the Filipinos. “She loved the poor and she had a lot to tell us still,” Arguelles said, remembering the occasion he escorted the late nun in one of her visits to the Philippines in 1978.

Mother Teresa is expected to be officially canonized in Rome on Sept. 4 next year. The move comes after Pope Francis recognized a second medical miracle attributed to the late nun, who dedicated her life to the poor, the sick and the dying in the slums of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India.

Cubao Bishop Honesto Ongtioco said the canonization was timely since the world needed more models “who live and work not for themselves but for others to glorify God.”

“Love was best expressed in her whole life as a witness to Christ,” Ongtioco said.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work among the poorest of the poor, Mother Teresa died on Sept. 5, 1997, age 87. At the time, the Missionaries of Charity based in Kolkata had nearly 4,000 nuns and ran roughly 600 orphanages, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics around the world.

The nun was born to Albanian parents in Skopje in what is now known as Macedonia as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910. Nicknamed the “saint of the gutters,” she dedicated her life to the poor, the sick and the dying in the slums of Kolkata, one of India’s biggest cities, founding the Missionaries of Charity order of nuns there. She won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

She was beatified by then Pope John Paul II in a fast-tracked process in 2003, in a ceremony attended by some 300,000 pilgrims. Beatification is the first step toward sainthood.

The miracle needed for her canonization concerned the inexplicable cure in 2008 of a man in Brazil with multiple brain abscesses who, within a day of being in a coma, was cured, according to a report in Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference.

The Vatican ascertained that his wife’s prayers for Mother Teresa’s intercession were responsible, the report said.

Mother Teresa is expected to be canonized as part of the Pope’s Jubilee Year of Mercy.

“The Holy Father has authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to proclaim the decrees concerning the miracle attributed to the intercession of blessed Mother Teresa,” the Vatican said in a statement.

In the Vatican’s jubilee calendar, Sept. 4 is marked as a day dedicated to the late nun’s memory and her canonization is likely to take place then, experts say.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

John Paul relics abound: Bloodied shirt, unwashed fork…

ROME—Inside a chapel on the edge of Rome, a nun uses a key to open a wooden wall panel, revealing a hidden niche. Behind glass hangs a relic of holy suffering: the bullet-pocked, bloodstained undershirt John Paul II was wearing when a gunman shot him in the stomach in St. Peter’s Square.

The short-sleeved garment bears the initials “JP,” sewn in red cotton thread on the label by nuns who did his laundry.

Jagged rips run down from the neck and sides, made when emergency room staff tore open John Paul’s shirt as they raced to save his life.

It’s one of the most remarkable of the relics of John Paul, who will be declared a saint on Sunday in the very same square where a Turkish would-be assassin shot him on May 13, 1981.

Relics of John Paul have enjoyed a boom ever since the beloved Pope was beatified in 2011.

The phenomenon has been fueled by John Paul’s longtime Polish confidant and secretary, Stanislaw Dziwisz, who doles them out to churches that request them.

The famous undergarment was discovered by the head nurse in the operating room at Rome’s Gemelli Polyclinic as she was cleaning the floor.

Nurse Anna Stanghellini, who lived out her last years at the church’s convent, donated the shirt to the nuns there, bequeathing a vivid testimony to John Paul’s physical suffering.

John Paul was the world’s first globe-trotting Pope, and he left things associated with him scattered around the world.

Relics in Manila

The Manila area restaurant where John Paul dined during his 1995 pilgrimage to the Philippines shows off the spoon, fork, water goblet, knives and table napkin—all still unwashed after his meal of grilled fish and fried shrimp.

Elsewhere in the predominantly Catholic Asian nation, shopping malls this month are showing strands of his silvery-white hair and a piece of bedsheet from his deathbed.

Irish Julia Feniquito, a 24-year-old nurse in  Quezon City, was still wearing her blue scrubs and looking to buy a dress when she passed by a traveling exhibit of John Paul relics in one shopping mall.

She kneeled to pray for several minutes in front of a makeshift altar and wrote her reflections on a sheet of paper, which she slipped into a box

under a papal skull cap.

“His aura, when you first see him, you can tell that he is very holy,” Feniquito said.

Papal blood

“John Paul II probably has stuff all over the place,” considering he was the third-longest serving Pontiff, said the Rev. Raymond Kupke, a professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. “If you think of all the places he has been to, the amount of relics is enormous.”

A tiny church in Naples packed its pews for nine days earlier this year when it displayed a gold-covered reliquary containing a drop of papal blood drawn for analysis from John Paul on his last day on Earth.

For the faithful, it’s a profoundly moving testament to the Pope’s courage in the face of death and suffering.

“This was the last blood taken from the Holy Father, his last day of life,” said the Rev. Jonas Gianneo, pastor of Santa Maria Francesca delle Cinque Piaghe church.

The pastor said the drop came from a vial of blood saved by Dziwisz, now cardinal of Krakow.



Selling relics sacrilegious 


Amid the proliferation of John Paul relics, Vatican experts say, it’s important to make key distinctions: Relics are categorized by the Vatican as “first-class” (those that are part of the saint’s body, such as bones or blood), “second-class” (items owned or used by a saint) and “third-class” (mostly things that were touched by the saint).

Selling relics is sacrilegious—but nothing stops the faithful from making a “donation” to whoever provided the relic, or purchasing the often ornate container holding the relic itself. AP

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net