Fifty Year Agony

September 5
Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, Mother
(1910-1997)

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the tiny woman recognized throughout the world for her work among the poorest of the poor, was beatified October 19, 2003. Among those present were hundreds of Missionaries of Charity, the Order she founded in 1950 as a diocesan religious community. Today the congregation also includes contemplative sisters and brothers and an order of priests.

Speaking in a strained, weary voice at the beatification Mass, Pope John Paul II declared her blessed, prompting waves of applause before the 300,000 pilgrims in St. Peter's Square. In his homily, read by an aide for the aging pope, the Holy Father called Mother Teresa “one of the most relevant personalities of our age” and “an icon of the Good Samaritan.” Her life, he said, was “a bold proclamation of the gospel.”

Mother Teresa's beatification, just over six years after her death, was part of an expedited process put into effect by Pope John Paul II. Like so many others around the world, he found her love for the Eucharist, for prayer and for the poor a model for all to emulate.

Born to Albanian parents in what is now Skopje, Macedonia (then part of the Ottoman Empire), Gonxha (Agnes) Bojaxhiu was the youngest of the three children who survived. For a time, the family lived comfortably, and her father's construction business thrived. But life changed overnight following his unexpected death.

During her years in public school Agnes participated in a Catholic sodality and showed a strong interest in the foreign missions. At age 18 she entered the Loreto Sisters of Dublin. It was 1928 when she said goodbye to her mother for the final time and made her way to a new land and a new life. The following year she was sent to the Loreto novitiate in Darjeeling, India. There she chose the name Teresa and prepared for a life of service. She was assigned to a high school for girls in Calcutta, where she taught history and geography to the daughters of the wealthy. But she could not escape the realities around her—the poverty, the suffering, the overwhelming numbers of destitute people.

In 1946, while riding a train to Darjeeling to make a retreat, Sister Teresa heard what she later explained as “a call within a call. The message was clear. I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them.” She also heard a call to give up her life with the Sisters of Loreto and, instead, to “follow Christ into the slums to serve him among the poorest of the poor.”
After receiving permission to leave Loreto, establish a new religious community and undertake her new work, she took a nursing course for several months. She returned to Calcutta, where she lived in the slums and opened a school for poor children. Dressed in a white sari and sandals (the ordinary dress of an Indian woman) she soon began getting to know her neighbors—especially the poor and sick—and getting to know their needs through visits.

The work was exhausting, but she was not alone for long. Volunteers who came to join her in the work, some of them former students, became the core of the Missionaries of Charity. Other helped by donating food, clothing, supplies, the use of buildings. In 1952 the city of Calcutta gave Mother Teresa a former hostel, which became a home for the dying and the destitute. As the Order expanded, services were also offered to orphans, abandoned children, alcoholics, the aging and street people.

For the next four decades Mother Teresa worked tirelessly on behalf of the poor. Her love knew no bounds. Nor did her energy, as she crisscrossed the globe pleading for support and inviting others to see the face of Jesus in the poorest of the poor. In 1979 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On September 5, 1997, God called her home.

Church Times Report

MOTHER TERESA had a crisis of faith throughout her 50 years of working among the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, says a book to be published next Tuesday on the tenth anniversary of her death.

The book, Mother Teresa: Come be my light, is a collection of previously unpublished writings and reflections, many in the form of letters to spiritual advisers. The Vatican overruled her instruction that they should be destroyed after her death. The book has been compiled by Fr Brian Kolodiejchuk of the Missionaries of Charity, the postulator for her Cause for canonisation.
The publishers, Doubleday, describe the book as a “moving chronicle” of Mother Teresa’s spiritual journey, which sheds light on her interior life “in a way that reveals the depth and intensity of her holiness for the first time. . . She emerges as a classic mystic whose inner life burned with the fire of charity and whose heart was tested and purified by an intense trial of faith, a true dark night of the soul.”

Mother Teresa is revealed to have suffered an almost permanent sense of desolation and torture. She speaks of “contradiction in my soul”; of a longing for God “so deep that it is almost painful”; of continual suffering; and a feeling of being “not wanted by God”. At her most despairing, she writes: “Souls hold no attractions. Heaven means nothing — to me it looks like an empty place.”

She writes of emptiness and having no faith — “I dare not utter the words and thoughts that crowd in my heart — and make me suffer untold agony.” Her smile is “a mask — a cloak that covers everything”. The silence and emptiness, she writes in 1979, is “so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves but does not speak.”

The Preacher of the Pontifical Household, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, said in an interview with Vatican Radio at the weekend that her “dark night” should not scandalise anyone. “The ‘dark night’ is something well known in the Christian tradition; maybe new and unheard in the way Mother Teresa experienced it.”

“While the ‘dark night of the spirit’ of St John of the Cross is a generally preparatory period for that definitive one called ‘unitive’, for Mother Teresa it seems that it was one stable state.” Fr Cantalamessa suggested that Mother Teresa’s prolonged state of suffering made her a “saint of the media age, because this ‘night of the spirit’ protected her from being a victim of the media, namely from exalting herself”.

Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and was beatified in 2003. One miracle has already been attributed to her, but a second needs to be verified before she can be canonised.