A true saint for the world
There is, in this world of ours, no shortage of kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, technocrats, plutocrats, sports heroes, film idols and celebrities of all sorts.
There is, however, a dearth of real saints. The woman known to history as Mother Teresa can be counted one of them.
For devout Roman Catholics, this is a simple fact after Pope Francis declared in Rome on Sunday that she would henceforth be known as St. Teresa. Her canonization, the culmination of a lengthy process that began shortly after she died in 1997 at the age of 87, signifies her importance for the Church. For believers, she is someone to be venerated and prayed to.
Yet the rest of the world can consider her a saint, too, in its secular sense: She lived a virtuous, selfless life, affirming the value of every living person and embracing the outcasts others turned away from. She placed no price tag on her compassion. She is an example for us all.
What Mother Teresa, now St. Teresa, did was to reject the easy religious life she could have known in Europe in exchange for a life of poverty and service in the wretched slums of Kolcata, India. It was there in 1950 that she started the religious order of the Missionaries of Charity. She said she wanted to help “all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.”
Today, the 4,500 religious sisters in this movement work in 133 countries running homes for people dying of AIDS, leprosy, and tuberculosis. In these places of refuge, the starving are fed, the sick treated and the dying comforted. As if this were not enough, the sisters put their beliefs into action in soup kitchens, mobile clinics, orphanages and schools.
For nearly half a century, Mother Teresa led this movement. As early as the 1970s, she had gained international fame, the personification, in her trademark white and blue sari, of boundless love.
Not surprisingly, this renown made her a target for critics. Her opposition to contraception and abortion earned her the ire of many feminists. Atheists complained she was trying to save souls, not lives. Some Christians said she did too little to convert the people she helped.
Let the naysayers chunter. We are more convinced of St. Teresa’s worth by the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to her in 1979, by the repeated recognition given to her by the government of India, and, as much as anything, by the way she is still held in high esteem in India today.
“One lone girl. Where did she come from?” asked Abhimanya Chatterjee outside a Hindu temple in Kolkata on the day of her canonization. “She left the entire big world and chose India. A hundred years from now, when people hear about her, they will be totally wonderstruck that she ever existed.”
Quite so.