Again, she was tested in the very terms of today’s Gospel.
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Yesterday, on September 4, Pope Francis declared Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun who devoted her life to helping India’s poor, a saint in a canonization Mass at the Vatican.
How blessed I was to meet Mother Teresa on numerous occasions, especially when I served as a priest and auxiliary bishop in Washington.
In the 50s, she sought the Vatican’s permission to start what would become known as the Missionaries of Charity. “She touched our lives, and we praise God for giving us such a wonderful saint”, said Palma in his homily.
In 2002, the Vatican ruled that an Indian woman’s stomach tumor had been miraculously cured after prayers to Mother Teresa. The rest of us, whether rich or poor, can also live the virtue of poverty in the middle of the world. She spent a long period of her life – decades, in fact – struggling with faith, losing the presence of God, and even believing that she didn’t believe in God, as she wrote in many pained, distressed, poignant letters that were only released after her death. So she has much to teach us. “Divorce is one of the biggest killers of family, love and unity”.
Many items came from Eileen Egan, who had worked for Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ overseas aid and development agency, when it was founded in 1943 as War Relief Services during World War II.
Mother Teresa might be the most famous, and most widely admired, Catholic personality of the 20th century.
“She blessed me a few times and she said, “Now you be a good boy”. We must teach mothers and fathers to learn to love their babies. A poverty marked by the lonely elderly in nursing homes, the young people given over to drugs and the hundreds of thousands of lives blighted by abortion (both children and their parents).
Canonization is what you might call the diagnosis of a pre-existing condition.
Does love define our work as it should? In those encounters, I met a woman, short in stature but a true spiritual giant, a woman meek and mild yet fearless in doing the will of God.
We keep our eyes not at “problems” per se, but at the discreet individuals. “Her life is an example for each one of us”, said sister Grace. Mother Teresa showed us that in spades.
As our organizations grow and develop and we attempt to gain credibility in the community while growing in our effectiveness, are we committed to keeping “personal transaction” as the irreplaceable core of our work?
The Year of Mercy, and September, in particular, aligns perfectly with the canonization of Mother Teresa.
The pope described the new saint as an “eloquent” model for her humble devotion to the poorest of the poor and an “emblematic figure of womanhood”. The sorts of experiences that Mother Teresa went through, everyday believers go through.
Twenty years ago Dina Blake had no religious beliefs, but this week she is on a pilgrimage to celebrate the canonisation of Mother Teresa.
Her quotes of mercy and love have broken through generational boundaries and now appear on Instagram to the background of sunsets and ocean waves.
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Note: Peggy Hartshorn is the president of Heartbeat International, a worldwide network of pregnancy resource centers.
