Kolkata

WHEN Mother Teresa's canonization took place on Sunday, a battered-looking audience gathered in front of a screen some 7,200 kilometres east of St Peter's Square: men with caved-in chests, weeping sores wrapped in gauze, extremities missing entirely, legs so thin you could encircle them with a finger and thumb.

Celebratory balloons had been strung from the rafters at Nirmal Hriday Home for the Dying Destitute, and they bounced around merrily under the overhead fans while nuns sang hymns in reedy voices. It is a spare, whitewashed space, not much changed since 1952, when Mother Teresa welcomed the hospice's first patient - a man found near death on the street.