Pope Meets With Mother Teresa at Shelter in Calcutta
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CALCUTTA — Pope John Paul II today met with Mother Teresa, known in this jammed, squalid city as the “saint of the gutters,” and prayed at her home for the destitute and dying.
Thousands of Calcutta’s 9 million inhabitants lined the route as the pontiff, on the third day of his 10-day, 14-city tour of India, was driven to the shelter through the teeming streets in his bulletproof, bubble-top white limousine.
The visit to the shelter was private but Mother Teresa, the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said the Pope would help feed the 86 dying men and women patients, all rescued from city streets--some cadaverous from starvation, others with limbs grotesquely swollen by infection.
She also said three of the shelter’s patients had died overnight and the Pope would bless their bodies.
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