Who is the 2003 Person of the Year? International media and magazines are full of guesses and proposals. Among them are hugely successful, frightening and powerful personalities. Michael Jackson's shadiness, the claims of homosexuals, Saddam Hussein's capture, the war against Osama Bin Laden and the soldiers in Baghdad are all among the most talked about subjects. However, all these suggestions have one limit: none offers hope to face 2004 and the years to come. Therefore, the staff at AsiaNews elects as Person of the Year, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, beatified on Oct. 19  2003.

This woman's greatness and that of her sisters is not merely a sugary sweet consolation amidst an evil world: they represent the answer to an evil world; their witness gives us the strength to confront the world and its miseries.  

Mother Teresa's sisters have dedicated themselves to the sadness felt by children –and in a much more loving and efficacious manner and much before Michael Jackson. Her sisters were in Baghdad long before the arrival of all the military contingents and even during the period of the embargo and dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. There is no plague, from Aids to humiliation of women, for which their hands, intelligence and hearts do not care. They are the active, everyday bearers of Jesus Christ's compassion. It is thanks to their testimony that we are all able to have hope: persecuted and persecutors, prisoners and freemen, Christians and Muslims, good and evil persons in history, alike.      

Thanks to them, to the One whom they symbolize, we can wish each other a happy new year in 2004.  And that even next year love will prove victorious again.

Bernardo Cervellera