Mother Teresa's relic heads for Europe

23 Jan 2009, 0225 hrs IST, Indrani Bagchi, TNN

NEW DELHI: Mother Teresa, who as the saint of Kolkata's slums, epitomized campassion and charity, is not only a treasure that Kolkata cherishes. Far away in Europe, Macedonia, wants a part of her too.

And it will get it. The foreign minister of Macedonia, Antonio Milososki, was in India last week for a couple of important things -- certainly to bond with India on a diplomatic level, but more important, to oversee the transfer of a Mother Teresa
relic.

A part of Mother Teresa -- some say her hand -- will be transported to Macedonia to be placed in her birthplace, Skopje, as a relic in a commemorative house that the government there has just built for her, said Milososki. The transfer has been done under established traditions closely supervised by the Roman Catholic Church, Milososki said.

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje on August 27, 1910, when Macedonia was still under the Ottoman Empire. But at 18, she left home to join the Loreto Sisters and in 1931 she arrived in Calcutta. By 1948, she took special permission to work in the slums of Calcutta and lived and worked there till her death on September 5, 1997. She started her own order in 1980, Missionaries of Charity.

She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and the Bharat Ratna in 1980. She was one of two persons to become an honorary citizen of the US in her lifetime as well as featuring on a postage stamp while still alive.

But with a part of her body to be taken to Macedonia soon, in her birthplace, the government there hopes to turn Skopje into a place of pilgrimage. Mother Teresa is already on what is being called a fast track to sainthood in the Catholic Church. If she attains sainthood, it's likely that other churches would also want a part of her body in their reliquaries.

In a way it's like having the embalmed body of St Francis Xavier, whose body is embalmed in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa and is a huge draw for tourists and pilgrims alike. The right forearm, which Xavier used to bless and baptize his converts, was detached in 1614 and is displayed since in a silver reliquary at a Jesuit church in Rome.