Mother Teresa has just been named a ‘Saint’ by the Catholic Church, and almost immediately Google began seeing an incredible spike in searches of ‘what does it take to be a saint?’ and things of that nature. People are naturally curious of the sainthood criteria as it’s something that doesn’t happen very often. So, above we’ve thrown together this quick montage of what exactly Mother Theresa did in order to achieve sainthood.
Here’s what USA Today has to say on this announcement of Mother Teresa’s sainthood from Pope Francis:
Tens of thousands of Roman Catholic faithful gathered for the canonization ceremony under a cloudless sky and amid tight security. Francis declared Mother Teresa — now to be called Saint Teresa of Kolkata — someone who “taught us to contemplate and adore Jesus every day, and to recognize Him and serve Him as well as to recognize and serve our brothers in need.”
Francis, who has declared 2016 as a Jubilee Year of Mercy, said he shared Mother Teresa’s ideal of a church as a kind of “field hospital” for the souls of the world’s poorest and most desperate.
“She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity,” Francis said. “She made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime of poverty they created.”
This is actually pretty f’n huge news in the world of Catholicism because the last saint to be named was Pope John Paul II and prior to that there hadn’t been a saint named since 1997, this really doesn’t happen all that often.
Here’s a famous statue of Mother Teresa found in the chapel of the Mother House, Kolkata, India. The statue is built to show the form in which Mother Teresa used to pray: