But it takes more than that to becoming a Catholic saint.
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So it is understandable why shortly after Mother Teresa’s death, her supporters were looking forward to her speedy beatification, the first step in a two-step process to sainthood, in which the Pope declares the candidate saint is in a state of bliss.
Born Agnes Bojaxhiu to an Albanian family in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, she was well known for her service to the poor and the destitute in India. Her Missionaries of Charity order continues the work she began in Calcutta around the world.
In 1946, while travelling by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, she was inspired to found the Missionaries of Charity order.
Mother Theresa’s supporters were hopeful that this would not take long, given her close friendship with Pope John Paul II. Indeed, she was the subject of a famous diatribe by Christopher Hitchens, who described her as “a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud”. The citation for the degree said that the university was privileged to recognize a woman “for whom love is not a slogan but a way of life”.
So, I asked him, what was the secret of Mother Teresa’s – if you can use the following word – success? “While the letters shocked some people, others saw them as proof of her steadfast faith in God, which was not based on feelings or signs that He was with her”. “There are no strikes”.
Kolodiejchuk, though, says she was no hypocrite.
His book captures how nothing was beneath Mother Teresa.
Dr. Snpresa Xhakli is already on her way to Rome. Mother Teresa placed a cross on his shirt as he was saying goodbye. “An angel of compassion”, said Father Desmond Daniels, Christ the Good Shepherd Catholic Church.
In novels or movies, characters often say, “Oh, who do you think I am?”
“I just thought that this myth had to be challenged”, he added.
The “darkness” became part of Mother Teresa’s ministry, the grace that gave it power.
Wearing a white sari with blue border – her perpetually smiling, wrinkled face etched permanently in the memory of the people – she remained an ever-accessible human being to commoners, celebrities and world leaders till her death on September 5, 1997, aged 87.
Did the Missionaries of Charity have a conversion agenda? An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism.
But her conviction to serve for the rest of her life didn’t happen overnight.
This is certainly a view held by many Hindu nationalists today.
But Mother Teresa still has legions of supporters in India, including BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Who were the people who most likely to risk their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust?”
The secret despair of Mother Teresa – combined with allegations from critics that the institutions she founded misused funds, had poor medical care, and practiced religious evangelism – makes her canonization more controversial than most. “She would be able to share that empathy because she herself was experiencing it”. The number of Missionary of Charity brothers has grown by 53 to 416. So to criticise her for opposing abortion and contraception, for instance, is to criticise her for not running a secular charity, which she never pretended to do.
The failings of her hospitals and shortcomings of her nursing staff are harder to excuse. But these, too can be seen as reflecting the overwhelming needs they were faced with, perhaps alongside a large dollop of naivety; a charge of which she was clearly guilty in her relationships with dictators and financial predators. The late writer didn’t like her because she took money and awards from lots of creeps – including the awful Duvalier family of Haiti. She and her order have a different agenda, and it’s troubling for them.
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“She is a model for us, or an example”.
