Relic of Indian Saint to Visit Waterford

A relic of Saint (Mother) Teresa of Calcutta is to visit Waterford.

The Knights of Columbanus recently received the relic from the Sisters of Charity and it is currently touring Ireland and will visit the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Waterford City on Thursday July 20, arriving at 7-30pm and will leave for a visit to the Cathedral in Enniscorthy on Saturday July 22 at 4pm, arriving at the Co Wexford venue at 7-30pm that same evening.

The relic, a muslin cloth bearing the blood of Saint Teresa encased in a cross has been touring Ireland since June 8, starting at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh, and has since made its way down the West Coast of Ireland into Munster taking in parts of Leinster before arriving in Waterford.

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje in Macedonia on August 26 1910, she was the youngest child of Nikolle and Dranafile Bojaxhiu. Her father, who was involved in Albanian-community politics in Macedonia, died in 1919 when she was eight years old. She left home in 1928 to join the Sisters of Loreto in Rathfarnham in Dublin where she learned to speak English with the view of becoming a missionary.

In 1929 she moved to India where she began to work with the poor and the needy. After she arrived she began her novitiate where she learnt Bengali  and taught in a nearby school near her convent. She took her first religious vows in May 1931, and chose to be named after Therese de Lisieux

She took her solemn vows in May 1937 while she was a teacher at a Loreto convent school in eastern Calcutta. She served there for nearly twenty years.

Although she enjoyed teaching at the school, she was increasingly disturbed by the poverty surrounding her in Calcutta.

She began missionary work with the poor in 1948. She founded a school in Motijhil, Kolkata, before she began tending to the poor and hungry. At the beginning of 1949 Teresa was joined in her effort by a group of young women, and she laid the foundation for a new religious community helping the "poorest among the poor".

In October 1950, Teresa received Vatican permission to form the diocesan congregation which would become the Missionaries of Charity which she founded in 1959 and quickly became throughout the world as Mother Teresa. Just over sixty years later her order had over 4,500 Religious Sisters working in 133 Countries across the world.

In 1979, Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitutes a threat to peace". She refused the conventional ceremonial banquet for laureates, asking that its $192,000 cost be given to the poor in India.

In March 1997 Teresa resigned as head of the Missionaries of Charity, and she died on 5 months later at the age of 87 and was canonised by Pope Francis in Rome in September 2016, becoming Saint Teresa of Calcutta.

According to a biography, during her early years Teresa was fascinated by stories of the lives of missionaries and by the age of 12, she was convinced that she should commit herself to religious life.

By 1997 the 13-member Calcutta congregation had grown to more than 4,000 sisters who managed orphanages, AIDS hospices and charity centres worldwide, caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless and victims of floods, epidemics and famine.