In celebration of complex saint
MOTHER TERESA: MORE REVERED THAN REVILED
Austere persona she displayed to the world masked troubled soul.
The woman the world came to know as Mother Teresa of Calcutta was called a lot of things in her lifetime. She was the “Saint of the Gutters” and an “Angel of Mercy.” But also a “religious imperialist” and, in the words of British author Christopher Hitchens, “a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud”.
For all the eloquence of her critics, she was always far more revered than reviled.
Millions acclaimed her as an icon of Christian charity and a global symbol of antimaterialism and worthwhile self-sacrifice.
Tomorrow, there will be a host of celebrations to mark her canonisation in Rome. A full programme to mark the conferring of sainthood on the late Albanian Roman Catholic nun and missionary included a photographic exhibition and a musical comedy on Thursday, a prayer evening yesterday and a catechism which Pope Francis will preside over today.
On the nun’s death in 1997, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth predicted Teresa would “continue to live on in the hearts of all those who have been touched by her selfless love”.
Since then, however, it has become apparent that the private Teresa was a more complex personality. The austere persona she displayed to the world with her gaunt, masculine face, masked a lighter, albeit troubled, soul.
For long periods, she was plagued by doubts about the faith that drove her mission to provide comfort to the dying.
“There is so much contradiction in my soul,” she wrote to the Bishop of Calcutta in a posthumously published letter dating from 1957. “Heaven means nothing to me, it looks like an empty place.”
As of tomorrow, the saintly tag becomes official thanks to a fast-track canonisation process that reaches its conclusion on the eve of the 19th anniversary of her death in what is now Kolkata.
Baptised Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Teresa was born into a Kosovar Albanian family in 1910 in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman empire and now the capital of Macedonia.
Her father, a businessman who was involved in the region’s Byzantine politics, died when she was eight.
At 18 she enrolled in an Irish order, the Sisters of Loreto, spending a brief period in Ireland learning English before her departure for India in 1929.
There she spent two decades teaching geography to the children of well-to-do families before founding her own order in 1950.
In 1979, her work in the Calcutta slums was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance speech she made a fervent defence of her approach to helping the poor, which was by then coming under increasing critical scrutiny. –