created a national holiday in her honor, BosNewsLife monitored.
Officials said October 19 in Albania will be set aside in memory of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who is of Albanian descent. It is also the day Pope John Paul II has set for beatification of Mother Teresa, the last formal step towards Roman Catholic sainthood.
This kind of procedures have been criticized by Evangelical Christians who believe that anyone accepting Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord has become a saint in God’s eyes.
The latest developments come amid a row between Albania and neighboring Macedonia over a Mother Theresa statue to be presented to Rome.
Although nobody disputes she was born in 1910 in the Skopje, the capital of what is now Macedonia, the criticism centers around the Cyrillic inscription on the statue, which reportedly reads: "Macedonia honors its daughter Gonxha Boiaxhiu".
ETHNIC TROUBLES
In Balkan tradition, the dispute hinges on her ethnicity. "Was she she Albanian or Valach, or Slav, or Zinzar?," are among the questions asked by politicians, intellectuals and ethnic Albanians reported the French News Agency AFP.
While representatives of Macedonia’s ethnic Albanian minority and Albania seem to know the answer, many in Macedonia doubt that her father was Albanian, news reports say.
"Mother Teresa was born in Skopje. She grew up here, went to school here, and we are proud of her order, which has become known throughout the world for its humanity," Skopje mayor Risto Penov told AFP who added there was nothing controversial about the statue.
POOR
Biographers say Mother Teresa first knew she would work with the poor at the age of 12 while attending a Catholic elementary school. By the age of 18, she became a teacher at a Catholic mission in the Indian city of Calcutta.
In 1950 she was given permission to start her now world-famous order "Missionaries of Charity" that focuses on serving the poor and forgotten.
Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1979 for her many decades of service. She died in September 1997, but her legacy continued and members of her order and volunteers carry on her work in India and around the world.
