Pope visiting Mother Teresa shelter in Vatican City

20 May, 2013 - Pope Francis is paying a private visit on Tuesday to the homeless shelter run by the Missionaries of Charity of Blessed Mother Teresa of Kolkata in Vatican City. During the evening visit to the shelter called “Dono di Maria”, the Italian for ‘Gift of Mary’, the Pope will meet the nuns along with the homeless and the volunteers. A stone’s throw from the southern colonnade of St. Peter’s Square, the centre was inaugurated by Blessed John Paul II and Mother Teresa on May 28, 1988. The shelter feeds hundreds of poor men and women and provides overnight accommodation and staffed medical care for some 50 to 70 women. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI had visited Dono di Maria on Jan. 4, 2008. Born of Albanian parents on Aug. 26, 1910 in Skopje, now in Macedonia, Mother Teresa joined the Irish Sisters of Loreto and arrived in Calcutta in 1929. Feeling a strong call to serve the poorest of the poor, she left the Loreto Sisters in 1948 and two years later founded her congregation of the Missionaries of Charity. She died on Sept. 5, 1997 in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta. Pope John Paul II in 2003 declared Mother Teresa Blessed, a step away from final sainthood.