Tens of thousands of pilgrims packed St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican for a service to honor the tiny nun, who worked among the world’s neediest in the slums of the Indian city now called Kolkata and become one of the most recognizable faces of the 20th century.
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Organised diocesan and parish pilgrimages generally had a priest-chaplain with them, celebrating daily Masses and joining them on tours.
Once, we had finished meeting Father Rossario, we realized that to understand the story completely we would have to meet the woman who had received the so-called miracle.
Over the next several months La Vergne completed a 5-by-6-foot oil painting of Mother Teresa. “She drank, from the font of Jesus, the living water of love”. Mother Teresa had faith in her Lord that resources would be provided for the people she served on the streets of Kolkata and indeed she walked by a faith beyond what she could see.
“People come forward and do little things with great love”, she said.
Deacon John and Arlene Storm from the Diocese of Santa Rosa, California, were among those at the Mass.
In 1994 Hitchens co-produced the documentary Hell’s Angel about Mother Teresa. based on the work of Indian-born physician, writer and “militant atheist” Aroup Chatterjee.
“They’ll find their niche”, he said, “and they’ll do fabulous work”.
Arturo Martinez, a young man from Miami, showed up at the Mass alone.
“I really believe in Mother Teresa, and I really believe in social justice”, she said.
Teresa had a comfortable life at the Congregation of Our Lady of Loreto that educated the girls of Calcutta’s well-heeled families. “The people who are not as fortunate as I am or maybe other people are”, he said.
LIVESAY: It was Francis, the people’s pope, who signed off on her canonization past year after the Vatican said it verified the second of her two miracles required for sainthood.
“It’s part of the inspiration of her, that she was so real”, MacKinnon said after her long vigil at the church.
Emmy Smith from the U.S. showed us a message she was typing to her friends back home: “Sister Prema giving speech”.
Mother Teresa was not a scholar in the common parlance of the day but her few books such as, Life in the Spirit (1983), A Simple Path (1995), In My Own Words (1996), and No Greater Love (1997) do serve to reveal her deep spirituality as well as her practical wisdom. “Mother Teresa was scheduled to be there at the request of an inmate”, he said. Fernanda, Andrino’s wife, has no doubt that it was a miracle; Mother Teresa has indeed cured her very sick husband. Once, when passing the Victoria Memorial Hall, the cavernous city icon built by the British as an homage to Queen Victoria, she leaned over Kumar and said, “Why don’t they give me this monument to house my poor?”
The experience started Ms. Kralik on a journey into hospice work and into the Lay Missionaries of Charity, an organization following the traditions of Mother Teresa.
“This handsome nun was not lovely from a physical standpoint”, he said, “but from a spiritual and a compassionate viewpoint, she is beyond words”.
“You can imagine that in 1948, when Bengal was still reeling under the awful after-effects of the bad starvation in which four million people had died, and the partition that came in 1947 and into that she stepped as a single nun, no helper, no companion, no money to speak of”.
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In what was probably the biggest gig of her career, the 25-year-old British star performed at the concert to celebrate the life of Mother Teresa on Sunday.
