Albania honors Mother Teresa at 100th anniversary of birth

TIRANA, Aug. 27 – Albanian Catholics wearing traditional folk costumes, along with school children, nuns and bishops and many other non-Catholic Albanians filled the courtyard of a cathedral named after Mother Teresa for a mass in Vau i Dejes in northern Albania, in Shkodra, and Tirana, commemorating what would have been the famous Albanian nun’s 100th birthday on Aug. 26.
Albanians are proud of the Albanian origins of Mother Teresa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. The country’s airport, main hospital and a square in the capital, Tirana, are named after her. Statues of her stand in the National Museum and in front of Tirana University.
Albania is also engaged for years in a dispute over the national identity of Mother Teresa, who born in 1910 in Skopje to an ethnic Albanian family.
But Albanians can really be proud of her origin.
“By blood, I am Albanian,” says Mother Teresa’s official biography on the Vatican website.
About two thirds of Albania’s 3.2 million people are Muslim, and the country has a sizable Christian Orthodox minority. Catholics are believed to make up about 10-15 per cent of the population. Exact figures are not available as the last census on religious affiliation was carried out before World War II.
Prime Minister Sali Berisha, Parliament Speaker Jozefina Topalli and other senior officials attended the mass in Vau i Dejes, a town 110 kilometers north Tirana, laying bouquets of flowers before a statue of the Nobel laureate before the ceremony.
Mother Teresa was “a mother, a woman that gave honor more than any one else to the Albanian nation,” Berisha said.
Born as Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, Mother Teresa went to Calcutta, India, in 1929, and dedicated herself to serving the poor and infirm. She died Sept. 5, 1997 at the age of 87.
She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003, putting her on the road to possible sainthood for her life’s work building shelters, orphanages and clinics around the world.
Post offices in Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia will issue a joint stamp of Mother Teresa to mark the centenary of her birth, and the national museum in Tirana, the Albanian capital, has opened a pavilion dedicated to her life.
Major roads, airports and public buildings across the country bear her name and cities and have statues of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning nun.