A world that has grown weary of violence, terrorism and division took a refreshing breath of joy on September 4, 2016. On that day, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was canonized by Pope Francis as a saint of the Catholic Church. She was one of the bestknown women of the 20th century, and her life story is worthy of celebration.
Not only Catholics, but people of all religions, consider her to be a saint for our times. By her simple and humble service to the poor in the forgotten slums of Calcutta, she became a rock star of holiness.
With the name Gonxha (Agnes) Bojaxhiu, she was born in 1910 to an ethnic Albanian family in Skopje, in what was then the Ottoman Empire. It has since become part of the country of Macedonia.
She was not born into a poor family. Her father was a partner in a successful construction business. After he died suddenly when Gonxha was 7, she and her siblings were raised by their widowed mother. Their upbringing included regular participation in their local Catholic parish. Whenever poor beggars came knocking on the door, their mother never let them go away hungry. She told her children that these people were their brothers and sisters, too.
At 18 years of age, Gonxha traveled to Dublin, Ireland, to enter a women’s religious community known as the Sisters of Loreto. Her superiors sent her to the novitiate in Darjeeling, India, in 1929. She made her first profession of religious vows as a Sister of Loreto in 1931 in Darjeeling. At that point, her name became Mary Teresa.
Her first assignment as a sister was to teach history and geography at a girls’ high school in Calcutta, where the students were the daughters of wealthy Indians. She continued serving at this school for 17 years in the comfort of stability and routine. This was a beautiful, peaceful, and holy life, yet God had more in store for Teresa.
On September 10, 1946, while riding a train from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat, she received a powerful divine inspiration, which she referred to as her “call within a call.” She said, “I heard the call to give up all and follow Christ into the slums to serve him among the poorest of the poor.”
She subsequently requested and received permission to establish a new religious community called the Missionaries of Charity. On August 17, 1948, she dressed for the first time in a white, blue-bordered sari, which eventually became the official habit of the new community of sisters. She started each day in communion with Jesus in the Mass, then went off to serve him in the unwanted and unloved in the streets of Calcutta.
Before long, she was joined, one by one, by her former students. The Missionaries of Charity soon grew to a worldwide community, always seeking to live with and serve the poorest of the poor. They have soup kitchens, homes for the dying, refuges for orphans, clinics for lepers, and centers for alcoholics. They minister to the sick, the elderly, street people, ex-prostitutes, and the most forgotten and abandoned.
When Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she used the monetary award to serve the poor in India. When she died on September 5, 1997, she was given the unprecedented honor of a state funeral by the government of India. The funeral carriage on which her body was transported had previously been used only for the funerals of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, two great political leaders of the Indian nation.
A scriptural passage that became a central theme of her life was the expression of Jesus Christ on the Cross in John 19:28, “I thirst.” She wrote, “The closer we come to Jesus, the better we will know his thirst.” In the official Constitutions of the Missionaries of Charity, she put this fundamental principle, which became the guiding statement of their mission: “The reason for our existence is to quench the thirst of Jesus Christ. When he asked for water, the soldier gave him vinegar to drink – but his thirst was for love, for souls, for you and me.”
In the chapels of the Missionaries of Charity throughout the world, they place those same words of Jesus on the wall next to the Crucifix: “I thirst.” The occasion of Mother Teresa’s canonization is an opportunity for all Christians to listen more attentively to the thirst of Jesus and respond with our whole heart.
Another scriptural passage that is key for understanding Mother Teresa is Matthew 25:40, where Christ says, “As you did to the least of these, my brethren, you did it to me.” This Gospel passage was the basis of Mother Teresa’s conviction that, in touching the broken bodies of the poor, she was touching the body of Christ. Her service was directed to Jesus himself, whom she considered to be hidden in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor.
After Mother Teresa died, her personal writings revealed a surprising fact of her interior life. Through her many years of service to the poor, she experienced a deep, painful longing for the love of God. She called her inner experience “the darkness.” This “painful night” of the soul reveals that her deep faith in God was not based on feelings or reassuring signs that he was with her. Through her darkness, she shared in the thirst of Jesus, in his burning longing for love, and in the desolation of the poor.
Mother Teresa was like a living icon of the Good Samaritan. All of us can learn from her example. She reminds us to embrace the poor and suffering, rather than avoid interacting with them. She said that the greatest evil is indifference toward one’s neighbor who is suffering. When a person is suffering, even a small amount of kindness can make all the difference in the world. She said, “It is not the magnitude of our actions, but the amount of love that is put into them, that matters.”
As the occasion of her canonization reminds us of the legacy of Mother Teresa, I would recommend to all people of goodwill that we open our eyes to those around us who are hurting, lonely and forgotten, and extend to them a gesture of kindness and compassion. In themselves, these small acts of love will not achieve world peace, but each one moves our hearts in the right direction.