Mother Teresa
Saint, Nobel Prize winner, and voice to the nameless suffering masses...
The woman who became Mother Teresa was born
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, the daughter
of a prosperous, ethnic Albanian business contractor in
Skopje, now the capital of Macedonia. When she was
seven, her father Nicholas died during what may have
been a Balkan ethnic brawl. She would always be silent
about her early life, but she told Muggeridge she had a
vocation to serve the poor from the time she was 12. At
18, Agnes joined Ireland's Sisters of Loreto and took the
name Teresa in honor of the French saint Therese of
Lisieux, renowned for her piety, goodness and
unflinching courage in the face of illness and early death.
After a brief period in Rathfarnham, where she learned
English at the order's abbey, Sister Teresa sailed for
India. She spent the next 17 years as a teacher and then
principal of a Calcutta high school for privileged Bengali
girls. It was on Sept. 10, 1946, during a train ride to
Darjeeling for a religious retreat, that Teresa received a
"call within a call" in which she felt God directed her to
the slums. "The message was quite clear," she told
colleagues. "I was to leave the convent and help the poor
whilst living among them. It was an order."
Two years later, after her adopted homeland won
independence, Teresa received permission from Rome to
strike out on her own. Attracting a dozen disciples, she
started what she called her "little society." The nuns
crept along the harsh streets of Calcutta in search of
mankind's most miserable; the sisters had to beg for their
own support, even their daily meals. "There were times
during the first three or four months," says Teresa's
biographer, Navin Chawla, "when she'd be humiliated,
and tears would be streaming down her cheeks. [She]
told herself, 'I'll teach myself to beg, no matter how
much abuse and humiliation I have to endure.'"
She soon asked the Vatican if she and her followers
could take a vow supplementary to those of poverty,
chastity and obedience: "to devote themselves out of
abnegation to the care of the poor and needy who,
crushed by want and destitution, live in conditions
unworthy of human dignity." It took Rome two years to
say yes, and in 1950 the Vatican formally established the
Missionaries of Charity, commanding members of the
order "unremittingly" to seek out the poor, abandoned,
sick, infirm and dying. Teresa warned that it was work
few persons could endure; each volunteer was told that
only a "burning fire" would succeed. With the
establishment of the order, Sister Teresa became Mother
Teresa, leading a ministry to the destitute, doomed and
dying. The order's guiding theme was her own: "Let
every action of mine be something beautiful for God."
One of the Missionaries' first projects, in 1952, was to
turn a former hostel beside a Hindu temple into a place
where the poor of Calcutta, who often died alone in the
streets, could spend their last hours in comfort and
cleanliness. As a Catholic mission, the sisters faced
alienation and neighborhood hostility. The temple priests
even asked city authorities to relocate the newly named
Nirmal Hriday, or Home for the Dying, hospice. But then
one of the Hindu priests was found with advanced stages
of tuberculosis after he had been denied a bed in a city
hospital, reserved for those who could be cured. And so
this representative of the enemies of the Catholic order
ended up in a corner of the Nirmal Hriday, tended by
Mother Teresa herself. When the priest died, she
delivered his body to the temple for Hindu rites.
News of
this charity filtered out into the city, and Calcutta started
its long love affair with the humble sisters.
Muggeridge brought that saintliness to the world's
attention in a 1969 BBC documentary. In it, he even
claimed to have witnessed a miracle: footage from an
area of the Home for the Dying that was deemed too
dark to register on celluloid turned out on processed film
to be bathed in a "particularly soft light" that Muggeridge
likened to love, "luminous, like the halos artists have seen
and made visible round the heads of saints." While the
episode was celebrated worldwide, cameraman Ken
Macmillan had a down-to-earth explanation: he had used
a brand-new kind of film from Kodak that was
particularly sensitive. Nonetheless, visitors to the hospice
noticed a beatific glow that surrounded the sisters
ministering to the dying.
Miracle worker or not, Mother Teresa was now a media
star. A decade after the documentary, she received the
Nobel Peace Prize because "poverty and distress also
constitute a threat to peace." At her request, the
traditional banquet was canceled so the $7,000 cost could
go to the poor. "We need to tell the poor that they are
somebody to us," she told the audience of rich and
honored guests, "that they too have been created by the
same loving hand of God, to love and be loved."
Today some 4,000 sisters of the Missionaries of Charity,
clad in white saris with blue borders, pursue her rigorous
path, along with 450 brothers in a separate men's order.
Mother Teresa created a network of 569 missions
spread across 120 nations that operate workshops for the
unemployed, food centers, orphanages, leprosariums, and
refuges for the insane, retarded and aged. She won
access to global leaders; she counted Princess Diana a
personal friend; Pope John Paul II valued her as a
revered colleague.
As her work earned fame around the world, money
poured in from individual and corporate benefactors.
Mother Teresa never worried about funding the many
expanding activities of her order. "The Lord sends it,"
she once said. "We do his work; he provides the means."
The order is reportedly flush with cash, though no
outsider knows the exact wealth in its coffers. In India
alone, revenue officials say, the group's assets exceed
$41 million, which is largely in real estate.
Mother Teresa had a more controversial side: she was
never afraid to speak and act with impunity on matters of
the secular world. She repeatedly decried abortion. "If a
mother can kill her own child, then what is left of the
West to be destroyed?" she once said. At Harvard
University's commencement in 1982 she called it "the
greatest evil."
There have been charges that her sisters not only give
succor to the dying but also ask if they want "tickets to
heaven," surreptitiously baptizing lifelong Hindus and
Muslims for Jesus. The sisters deny these accusations; in
India such conversions would be met with outrage, and
the charge is widely disbelieved. But such acts would be
in keeping with Teresa's fervent devotion to the cause of
Christ.
Recently she came under attack from those who believe,
as George Orwell once wrote about Mahatma Gandhi,
that all saints should be judged guilty until proved
innocent. In 1994 Britain's Channel 4 broadcast a
revisionist look at Teresa that was harshly titled Hell's
Angel. Written by Pakistani-born leftist Tariq Ali and
British columnist Christopher Hitchens, the program
claimed that the Missionaries of Charity accepted
donations from some unsavory individuals, including
Haiti's former autocrat Jean-Claude Duvalier. In return,
Mother Teresa and her sisters delivered effusive
encomiums in favor of the rich and infamous eager to
buy international respectability. Teresa replied that she
had no moral right to refuse donations given for the poor
and miserable. Hitchens followed up with a scathing,
book-length critique called The Missionary Position:
Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, which noted that
Mother Teresa once wrote to Judge Lance Ito
requesting leniency for Charles Keating, whom he was
about to sentence in the late-1980s savings-and-loan
scandal. Keating had once contributed $1.25 million to
the Missionaries of Charity.
The order's Home for the Dying in Calcutta also
attracted criticism. Unlike in modern hospices in the
West, the dying at the mission home are not provided
with pain-killing drugs. In November 1996 a German
volunteer questioned one of Teresa's nuns. "I have heard
you don't give any medicines," he said. The nun replied,
"This is not a treatment center. This is a place where the
dying can die with dignity."
For decades Mother Teresa was elected head of the
order with only one dissenting vote: her own. But in the
fall of 1996, she nearly succumbed to heart disease, and
the sisters realized it was time to elect a successor. In
March, 123 representative nuns gathered to pray for
wisdom and chose a Hindu Brahmin convert named
Sister Nirmala, whom one called a compassionate
"carbon copy" of their revered leader.
Despite her celebrity status
and a flourishing empire, Mother Teresa had a faith that
was not of this world. She was intent on saving souls in
an era that no longer believed souls existed. She
confounded and overcame that skepticism with the
paradox attributed to St. Francis of Assisi nearly eight
centuries ago: in giving we receive; in dying we are born
to eternal life. It was not a message the 20th century
expected to hear or wanted to learn, and Teresa angered
many with her simple, hardheaded adherence to it. But to
many others, the rewards of her example were
enormous. As hundreds of mourners gathered at
Calcutta's mother house last week, a weeping Muslim
driver explained, simply, "She was a source of perpetual
joy," a holy commodity indeed.
Links to other sites on the Web
Return to Front Page
Mother Teresa: Missionary of Compassion
Mother Teresa: Nobel Prize Winner
Mother Teresa's Home Page
Mother Teresa
In Memoriam: Mother Teresa Memorial
Mother Teresa of Calcutta: 1910-1997
© 1997 wendyt@ucla.edu
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