SOON TO BE A SAINT
Mother Teresa will be canonized on Sunday
When she is canonized on Sunday, Mother Teresa will be among the rarest of saints: one who still exists in living memory.
Her path to sainthood — the highest honour in the Catholic Church — has been swift because of her popularity in life. But her detractors are still around to make their case.
Mother Teresa, who stood just shy of five feet tall and whose name will be recorded as St. Teresa of Calcutta in the pantheon of the canonized, started her mission in Calcutta in obscurity, but eventually emerged as one of the most recognizable names on the planet.
She met with popes, presidents, rock stars and royalty. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, accelerating her popularity into the stratosphere.
Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian in charge of promoting Mother Teresa’s cause for sainthood, says only two other saints, St. Francis of Assisi and St. John Paul II, have had as “wide an echo” inside and outside the church. Her popularity, tinged as it is by secular criticism, may make her the most important woman to the church in modern times.
Pope John Paul II rushed Mother Teresa into sainthood, waiving the five-year waiting period after her death in 1997. The move was criticized by those who questioned whether “the Saint of the Gutters” was enriching her own image while cultivating poverty. It’s a criticism that has survived her death.
William Doino, an esteemed American Catholic writer, says continued suspicion about Mother Teresa is likely the result of “opposition to religion in general and especially the Catholic Church. Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said, ‘There are not 100 people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.’ I would apply that comment globally, and in particular to the remaining critics of Mother Teresa.”
Yet to most of the world, the woman born Agnes Bojaxhiu, to Albanian parents in 1910, remains an inspiration to the idea that one person can work wonders.
As a Sister of Loreto she taught at one of the order’s schools for girls in India in 1929-48. Her life changed after a bus ride into the slums of Calcutta in the 1940s. She decided her calling was to live with the “poorest of the poor,” the rejected and the dying. This was a time, too, when India was dealing with the murderous upheaval of the partition from Pakistan that left 14 million homeless.
In 1950, the Vatican began the process to approve a new order, the Missionaries of Charity, consisting of Mother Teresa and 12 other nuns.
Her name became known after British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge interviewed her for the BBC in 1967. He later took a film crew to Calcutta and wrote Something Beautiful for God, a moving account of her life to that point.
“I think she is a unique person in the world today; not in our vulgar celebrity sense of having neon lighting about her head,” Muggeridge wrote. “Rather in the opposite sense — of someone who has merged herself in the common face of mankind, and identified herself with human suffering.”
Sister Bernice, a member of the Missionaries of Charity in Toronto, met the tiny nun as a postulate in the Bronx in the late 1970s. She had heard of her a few years earlier while studying psychology at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. She found a copy of Time magazine with Mother Teresa’s image on the cover. Her story, she says, was a call from God.
“You could see she was the type of person who did everything with God first. She always asked God first. She would always bow her head to pray and then she lifted it up with a smile,” recalls Sister Bernice.
Kolodiejchuk, who was born in Winnipeg, is a priest with the Missionaries and knew Mother Teresa for 20 years.
As her postulator making the case for her canonization, he compiled 35,000 pages of documents and testimony to present to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Next followed the difficult work of finding two verifiable miracles — cures that could not be attributed to medicine.
The first came in 1998 when it was decided an Indian woman’s cure from cancer was a result of praying to Mother Teresa. The second was 10 years later with the cure of a Brazilian engineer who was dying from multiple brain abscesses.
The congregation also heard from her detractors. The most famous was the au- thor and atheist Christopher Hitchens. He recalled in his book Hitch-22 the odd event of being asked to testify at the Vatican.
“( I) thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic.”
He and other critics said she encouraged poverty rather than made a concerted attempt to eradicate it. She was criticized for her opposition to contraception and birth control, and the very Catholic belief that suffering was a gift from God, in that it united a person to Christ on the cross. Three Canadian academics opposed her canonization in an open letter, arguing she was undeserving because of her stance on abortion.
“Mother Teresa would have said, ‘I’m not called to be successful but faithful,’ ” Kolodiejchuk says. “‘ And if not for what we do there’d be more suffering and misery.’ ”
Her popularity also drew attention to the plight of the poor, he points out. When she died in 1997, the Missionaries had 4,000 members along with an order of priests. Today 5,000 serve in more than 567 homes worldwide.
“She was not working to eradicate the structures of the poverty. Her concern was to bring immediate and effective health to the people who needed help and shelter,” says Kolodiejchuk.
Hitchens’ attacks went deeper. He questioned whether Mother Teresa possessed any faith at all.
He came to this conclusion after the publication of Come Be My Light, a series of her personal reflections edited by Kolodiejchuk.
She wrote about what is called the Dark Night of the Soul, a period in which deeply spiritual people no longer feel the presence of God.
“As for myself, I just have the joy of having nothing — not even the reality of the Presence of God,” Mother Teresa wrote. “No prayer, no love, no faith — nothing but continual pain of longing for God.”
Despite her feeling of spiritual isolation, she never gave up on God or the church. The suffering she acknowledged as holy came from the essence of Christianity — Christ’s death on the cross was a way of showing love for humanity.
“She didn’t actually use the word mercy so much,” says Kolodiejchuk. “Mercy is to do something for someone. She used the word compassion, which means to ‘suffer with’ someone. She wanted to live the poor and lead her own poor, simple life.”