Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta 1910-97
Contrary
to the regulation that no person should be beatified until five years
after death, Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa of Calcutta in
1999, just two years after her death. One of her chief critics,
Christopher Hitchens, was interviewed for the process.
Early life
She was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in
Skopje, capital of the present Republic of Macedonia, in 1910. Her
father, who was an Orthodox Christian, died when she was eight and she
grew up in the care of her Catholic Albanian mother. She was fascinated
from her childhood with missionaries and by the time she was twelve she
wanted to enter religious life. In 1928, when she was eighteen, she left
to join the Sisters of Loreto in Ireland where she took the name Mary
Teresa. Sent as a missionary to Calcutta, she enjoyed her work as a
teacher and school principal, but was disturbed by the poverty
surrounding her in Calcutta.
Her call: To be poor with the poor
One day while
travelling on a train to Darjeeling, she experienced an overwhelming
sense of divine call "to be poor with the poor". She waited for two
years for approval of the new order she founded, the Missionaries of
Charity, before going into the slums of Calcutta. Here she washed
children's sores, cared for an old man lying on the road and for an old
woman dying of tuberculosis and starvation.
Her work: contemplatives at the heart of the world
Soon
some of her former students joined her and thirty years later her work
had spread worldwide. "We are not social workers," she said. "We may do
social work, but we are contemplatives at the heart of the world."
Another expression of hers was: "Do ordinary things with extraordinary
love."
Her message: find your own Calcutta
Mother Teresa
won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. When people wanted to join her in
her work in Calcutta, she would say, "Find your own Calcutta. Don't
search for God in far-off lands. He is close to you, he is with you."
Criticisms
There were many criticisms of her,
especially for her strong views on contraception and abortion. In
addition, there were allegations of misuse of donations. In particular,
Christopher Hitchens in his book, The Missionary Position (1995),
said she was a political opportunist who adopted the guise of a saint
in order to spread an extreme and aggressive version of Catholicism.
Interior dryness
Although she kept the outward
appearance of being undisturbed, in many of her letters, now being
edited for her canonisation, Mother Teresa gave expression to feelings
of deep interior dryness:
The damned of hell suffer eternal punishment because they experience the loss of God. In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God, and that he does not really exist.
However she continued to trust that the God she had never seen was to be found in the poor for whom she worked.
Death and influence
When she died on 5th
September 1997, the Government of India gave her a state funeral in
gratitude to her services to the poor of all religions in India.
At the
time of her death the Missionaries of Charity numbered 4,500 and had 517
missions in over a hundred countries.