Pilgrims crowd Kosovo church where Mother Teresa once prayed

Pope Francis will declare Mother Teresa a saint at the Vatican on September 4.

Letnica, Kosovo:  The thousands of pilgrims who flocked to the bright white Church of the Black Madonna this year were hoping to receive the gift of grace that one of its most famous parishioners once experienced.

A devout Albanian girl named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu — who would later be known around the world as Mother Teresa — spent summers in the 700-year-old village and the Church of the Black Madonna in her youth. Pope Francis is slated to canonize her — making her a saint — on Sept. 4.

If she wasn’t praying in the church, she was known to roam the fields above the village and find quiet places to write poems and prayers, said the Rev. Lush Gjergj, the general vicar of Kosovo’s Roman Catholic diocese and a close friend of Mother Teresa who has written 15 books about the nun’s life.

“She made the decision of her life here and said ‘I want to become a missionary nun, to help the poor of the world,’ a vision which became reality for an 18-year-old Albanian girl,” he said.
A formerly thriving Croat village reduced to only 300 people since the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, Letnica is an important pilgrimage destination for thousands of Catholics, Orthodox Christians and even Muslims during a nine-day period that ended with the Feast of the Assumption on Aug. 15.

“This festival is honored by Catholics, but for centuries, it has been celebrated by all the other religions and nations,” said the Rev. Kriste Gjergji, a priest at the Church of the Black Madonna.
This year, Kosovo police estimated 10,000 people traveled to Letnica, near the borders of Macedonia and Serbia, for the Catholic festival.

Lt. Dan Brankin, a U.S. soldier from Fort Carson, Colo., who was deployed to Kosovo as part of the United States-led NATO peacekeeping mission, was at Letnica to monitor the security situation.

Hundreds of Catholic soldiers from NATO’s peacekeeping mission in Kosovo regularly attend the festivities in Letnica. But due to recent terror attacks and heightened security threats throughout Europe, many were not allowed to come this year.

Brankin, a Catholic, was on duty but he felt moved by witnessing the faithful in the village before Mother Teresa’s expected canonization.

“It is an incredible opportunity for me, for my faith,” he said, adding: “It’s a really big event, especially this year with the canonization of Mother Teresa.”

There are about 65,000 Catholics in Kosovo, an officially secular but predominantly Muslim nation with a population of 1.8 million.

Source: Religion News Service