West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee plans to travel to Vatican City to attend the canonisation of blessed Mother Teresa on September 4. “Sister Prema on behalf of the Missionaries of Charity invited me to be present in Rome for the canonisation of Blessed Mother Teresa. I have accepted her invitation,” Ms Banerjee said here Sunday.
Sister Prema, superior-general of the Missionaries of Charity, Archbishop of Calcutta Thomas D’Souza and some others went to Ms Banerjee’s home in Kolkata’s Kalighat area Sunday afternoon and invited her to the Vatican event.
“Mother Teresa will be canonised in the Vatican. But she spent 45 years serving the poor and sick on the streets of Kolkata. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. She also breathed her last in the city in 1997. So on the auspicious day of her sainthood, the representatives of the Missionaries of Charity want Ms Banerjee to be there,” a close aide of Ms Banerjee said.
Ms Banerjee has had good relations with Missionaries of Charity for a long time, and says she worked with Mother Teresa when riots errupted in the city in 1992. When Sister Nirmala, Mother Teresa’s successor, died in 2015, Ms Banerjee was present at her funeral at Mother House.
