Catholic icon Teresa was both adored and attacked

Vatican City, Sep 4: For those who revered her, Mother Teresa's elevation to the Catholic sainthood today came not a moment too soon.

The diminutive nun whose journey from a corner to the Ottoman Empire to the slums of India made her one of the most famous women in the world was regarded by many as a saint during her lifetime.

"Saint of the Gutters" and "Angel of Mercy," were among the sobriquets she picked up over the course of nearly four decades working with the wretched poor of Kolkata and building her Missionaries of Charity order into a global force.

But there was another school of thought. Australian feminist Germaine Greer called her a "religious imperialist" who preyed on the most vulnerable in the name of harvesting souls for Jesus. And her most ferocious critic, the British polemicist Christopher Hitchens called her "a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud." But Teresa was always far more revered than reviled.

Millions acclaimed her as an icon of Christian charity and a global symbol of anti-materialism and worthwhile self-sacrifice. Her adopted homeland, India, took her to its heart.

"It is natural for every Indian to take pride in Mother Teresa's canonisation," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said earlier this week. On her death in 1997, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II predicted Teresa would "continue to live on in the hearts of all those who have been touched by her selfless love."

The private Teresa was a more complex personality than she appeared to the world. Behind her gaunt, wrinkled face lay a troubled soul. For long periods, she was plagued by doubts about the faith that drove her mission to provide comfort to the dying.

"There is so much contradiction in my soul," she wrote to the Bishop of Calcutta in a posthumously published 1957 letter. "Heaven means nothing to me, it looks like an empty place."

Two years later, she wrote to a priest friend saying: "If I ever become a saint, I will surely be one of darkness; I will continually be absent from heaven - to light the light of those in darkness on earth." The saintly tag became official today, thanks to a fast-track canonisation process that reaches its conclusion on the eve of the 19th anniversary of her death in what is now called Kolkata, formerly Calcutta.

(AFP)