VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — The Vatican’s liturgy office today announced that Mother Teresa of Calcutta would be inserted into the Church’s liturgical calendar with an optional memorial.
In a decree issued February 11, the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (CDW) gave details about Mother Teresa’s new inscription into the Catholic Church’s liturgy on September 5.
Signed by the CDW prefect and secretary – Cardinal Arthur Roche and Archbishop Vittoria Viola – the text said the move was in response to requests:
Therefore, Pope Francis, accepting the petitions and desires of Pastors, Religious men and women, as well as Associations of the Faithful, and considering the influence exercised by the spirituality of Saint Teresa in different parts of the world, has decreed that the name of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Virgin, shall be inscribed in the General Roman Calendar and her Optional Memorial shall be celebrated by all on 5 September every year.
The memorial is optional, meaning that it will be for local dioceses to observe it. Mother Teresa’s memorial is now to placed into all calendars and liturgical texts for Mass and the Divine Office.
“Radically living the Gospel and boldly proclaiming it, Saint Teresa of Calcutta is a witness to the dignity and honor of humble service,” wrote Roche. “By choosing not only to be the least, but the servant of the least, she became a model of mercy and an authentic icon of the Good Samaritan.”
Born in 1910 in Skopje in North Macedonia, Mother Teresa joined the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland at the age of 18. She then moved to Calcutta with the order where, after spending years teaching in Loreto schools, her life became centered around ministry to the poor and ailing in the slums of Calcutta.
In 1948 she established the Missionaries of Charity to continue that work, and it soon spread across the world, drawing many religious sisters as well as lay helpers. Her work also threw the plight of the unborn into the public sphere, championing the cause of children before and after birth.
Famously during the February 5, 1994, National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., and in the presence of pro-abortion President Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa stated:
But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?
READ: Now is a good time to recall Mother Teresa’s sobering words on the conditions for true peace
She died on September 5, 1997, by which point her order was present in over 120 countries worldwide. Pope John Paul II opened her cause of canonization in 2002 and beatified her in October 2003, while Pope Francis canonized her in September 2016.
In a further explanatory note from the Vatican today, Roche said his office’s decree dated to December 24 last year, and comes by way of Pope Francis responding “to the requests of bishops, religious and associations of the faithful, and considering the influence of the spirituality of Saint Teresa of Calcutta throughout the world, wished to propose her an outstanding witness to hope for those who had been discarded in life.”
Accompanying the decree were the authorized liturgical texts for her memorial, including the Collect, the Epistle, Alleluia verse, and Gospel, along with the reading for the Divine Office which is drawn from a letter Mother Teresa wrote to her spiritual director, Father Joseph Neuner, S.J., in 1960.
“May the insertion of this celebration in the General Roman Calendar help us to contemplate this woman, a beacon of hope, small in stature yet great in love, a witness to the dignity and privilege of humble service in the defence of all human life and of all those who have been abandoned, discarded and despised even in the hiddenness of the womb,” wrote Roche.