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India to get its first female saint, and it’s not Teresa

For the first time in the 2000-year history of the Catholic Church, a woman, popularly known as Sister Alphonsa, will be declared a saint by Pope Benedict XVI.

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Sister Alphonsa from Kerala will be canonised on Oct 12

NEW DELHI: India will soon get its first female saint. And no, its not Mother Teresa. For the first time in the 2000-year history of the Catholic Church, a woman, popularly known as Sister Alphonsa from Kottayam, Kerala, will be declared a saint by Pope Benedict XVI.

She will be canonised on October 12, a meeting of the Vatican’s Consistory of Cardinals decided in Rome on Saturday. This is the second time an Indian will be declared a saint. The first was Gonsalo Garcia, canonised in 1862. Garcia, who was from Vasai, was born of an Indian mother and Portuguese father in 1556. He was crucified in 1597 in Nagasaki.
 
Blessed Alphonsa, as she is currently referred to, was beatified in 1986 by the late Pope John Paul II, along with the Blessed Kuriakose Elias Chavara, also from Kottayam, during his first visit to India. Mother Teresa was beatified by the Pope on October 19, 2003, after Vatican investigators recognised the miracle healing of an Indian woman with a cancerous tumour. Beatification is the penultimate step on the path to sainthood.

Sister Alphonsa was beatified after a handicapped boy of Kottayam was cured of his deformity as he prayed at Alphonsa’s tomb.

Alphonsa was born Annakutty, on August 19, 1910, in Kudamaloor near Kottyam. This fourth child of Muttathupadath Ouseph and Mariam, lost her mother at the age of three. When her maternal aunt compelled her to be engaged against her wishes — she wanted to become a nun — she burnt her foot by placing it an ash pit. She later joined the Franciscan Clarist Convent at Bharananganam, Kerala, on August 2, 1928, and was renamed Alphonsa.

She died young, at the age of 37, on July 28, 1946, of severe illness. Her tomb at Bharananganam turned into a great centre of pilgrimage.

k_benedict@dnaindia.net

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