INDIA:Special prayers were said yesterday to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta, where she had made her home.
Hundreds of people gathered at dawn beside her simple tomb at the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded more than 60 years ago to care for the sick, aged and dispossessed.
Many devotees drawn from the city's poorest communities participated in a candlelight procession in memory of the Albanian-born nun, who died at the age of 87 and whose untiring charity work earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
Leading a special service to mark the anniversary of her death, Archbishop Lucas Sirkar of Calcutta urged the papal authorities in Rome to speed up her canonisation.
"Our expectation is that she will soon be declared a saint because she lived as a saint and now lives as a saint in heaven," he said.
Known as the "Saint of the Gutters" for her work among the poor and dying, Mother Teresa, with her distinctive blue-bordered white sari - her order's uniform - was beatified in 2003 by pope John Paul II.
So admiring was he of her religiosity that he waived the standard waiting period for her beatification in order to hasten her canonisation.
But the recent publication of Mother Teresa's letters, in which she spoke of being tormented by doubts over her faith, has raised concerns that the canonisation process could be jeopardised.
However, Pope Benedict XVI allayed these anxieties at the weekend by publicly stating that Mother Teresa's torment and confusion over God's silence was not unusual.
The letters, which were written by Mother Teresa to colleagues and superiors over the course of 66 years and were compiled by an advocate for her sainthood under the title Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, reveal that at times she doubted God.
"Such deep longing for God - and . . . repulsed - empty - no faith - no love - no zeal," she wrote in 1956.
This was six years after she had founded the Missionaries of Charity and had begun scouring Calcutta for lepers and the destitute to bring them to a hospice and succour them through their last days.