Mother Teresa leaves a lasting legacy

Vatican - Nobel laureate revered by millions of Indians despite criticism from some quarters

Affectionately called the "saint of the gutters" during her lifetime, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be made an official saint of the Roman Catholic Church on Sunday, just 19 years after her death.

A Nobel peace prize winner, Mother Teresa was one of the most influential women in the Church's 2,000-year history, acclaimed for her work amongst the world's poorest of the poor in the slums of the Indian city now called Kolkata.

Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to attend the canonisation service for the nun, which will be led by Pope Francis in front of St. Peter's basilica.

Although criticised both during her life and following her death, Mother Teresa is revered by Catholics as a model of compassion who brought relief to the sick and dying, opening branches of her Missionaries of Charity (MoC) order around the world.

"Even in popular culture she's identified with goodness, kindness, charity," said Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the MoC priest who campaigned for her sainthood.

In novels or movies often characters say, "'Oh, who do you think I am? Mother Teresa?'" he said.

Her critics view her differently, arguing she did little to alleviate the pain of the terminally ill and nothing to stamp out the root causes of poverty.

In 1991, the British medical journal the Lancet visited a home she ran in Kolkata for the dying and said untrained carers failed to recognise when some patients could have been cured.

Kolodiejchuk said her detractors missed the point of her mission, arguing that she had created a place to comfort people in their final days rather than establish hospitals.

"We don't have to prove that saints were perfect, because no one is perfect," he said.

In her adopted India, Mother Teresa has been accused of looking to convert the destitute to Christianity - something her mission has repeatedly denied. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the umbrella right-wing Hindu organisation that helped create India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), also accuses Mother Teresa of revelling in the misery of others.

"As a resident of Kolkata, I feel insulted to see its poverty being glorified by the MoC. As a Hindu nationalist I also feel that Christianity is not the only way of salvation," said Jishnu Bose, the RSS spokesman in the city.

But Mother Teresa still has legions of supporters in India, including BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "All her life she worked to serve poorer sections of Indian society. When such a person is conferred with sainthood, it is natural for Indians to feel proud," Modi said on Sunday in a radio broadcast.

Her reputation has also suffered as the focus of Western aid work has moved away from immediate relief to development programmes designed to deliver sustainable improvements in living standards: the model of teaching people to fish rather than feeding them fish.

Teresa was well aware of such criticism during the latter stages of her life, answering them by saying that her faith in Christ made her know that holding the hand of a dying person was a worthwhile activity.

Nor did she deny that evangelism was her primary purpose: we are missionaries, not social workers, she said in various formulations over the years.

There was never the slightest hint of her compromising on the tenets of Catholicism in the name of improving the lot of impoverished communities, a stance most famously illustrated by her description of abortion as murder by mothers in her Nobel acceptance speech in 1979.

Mother Teresa was born Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu of Albanian parents in 1910 in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire and is now Macedonia. She became a nun at 16 and moved to India in 1929, creating her mission in 1950.

The Roman Catholic Church has more than 10,000 saints, many of whom had to wait centuries before their elevation.

But Mother Teresa, one of the most recognisable faces of the 20th century, was put on the fast track to sainthood after dying of a heart attack on September 5, 1997.

The late Pope John Paul II bent Vatican rules to allow the procedure to establish her case for sainthood to be launched two years after her death instead of the usual five, and she was beatified in 2003.

Around 100,000 pilgrims are expected in Rome for Sunday's ceremony, around a third of the total that turned out for Teresa's beatification, seen as the last major outing for John Paul II who died in 2005.

Under Catholic canon law, the proclamation of a saint usually requires the candidate to have inspired two miracles - one allows beatification and the second clears the way to sainthood.

In Teresa's case the first miracle, approved in 2002, involved the 1998 recovery of a Bengali woman, Monica Besra, from an ovarian tumour.

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