Mother Teresa - Saint to the poorest of the poor!

Mother Teresa, a tiny framed nun who did great things for the poorest of the poor in the slums of India and beyond, nicknamed the 'Saint of the Gutters’, will be declared a saint next year after Pope Francis approved a miracle attributed to her intercession. The canonization in the Vatican will probably take place on September 4, 2016. That will be the nineteenth anniversary of her death.

Pope Francis approved a decree attributing a second miracle to Mother Teresa, clearing the path for the nun to be elevated to sainthood.  The miracle was approved during an audience with the head of the Vatican's department on saints  on Thursday, his 79th birthday. Pope Francis has dedicated his ministry to ministering to the poor just as Mother Teresa did. He admires and respects Mother Teresa. He met her personally in 1994. He knew her to be a strong woman that would not be pushed around by bishops. It is only fitting that Francis be the Pope to canonize Mother Teresa.

The second miracle was the cure of a Brazilian man suffering from a viral brain infection that resulted in multiple abscesses. By Dec. 9, 2008, he was in a coma and dying, suffering from an accumulation of fluid around the brain. Thirty minutes before the man was due to undergo surgery, he sat up, awake and without pain. The surgery did not take place and a day later the man was declared to be symptom-free by medical doctors. We (Catholics) do not believe that Mother Teresa caused the miracle, God caused the miracle and Mother Teresa was the intercessor.

The Vatican attributed the cure to the fervent prayers to Mother Teresa's intercession by the man's wife, who at the time of his scheduled surgery was at her parish church praying alongside her pastor.

The traditional Roman Catholic canonization procedure requires at least two medical miracles. One before a deceased Catholic can be declared “blessed,” and another occurring after that declaration then he or she can be canonized as a saint. The miracles must be confirmed by a medical team of doctors. They must find that there is no scientific reason for the healing.

She was beatified in 2003 after Pope John Paul II recognized her first miracle. He believed the healing of a seriously ill Indian woman of a tumor was the result of Mother Teresa's intervention. Pope John Paul II, one of Mother Teresa's greatest supporters, in 1999 waived the normal five-year waiting period for her beatification process to begin and launched it a year after she died. The process leading up to the sainthood has been the shortest in modern history. Normally it takes 100 years or more to be declared a saint by the Vatican.

Mother Theresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, on Aug. 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, to an Albanian family. Mother Teresa joined the Loreto order of nuns in 1928. In 1946, while traveling by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling, she was inspired to form the Missionaries of Charity order.

The order was established four years later in 1950 and at the time of her death, September 5, 1997, her Missionaries of Charity order had nearly 4,000 nuns and ran roughly 600 orphanages, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and clinics around the world.

Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work with Calcutta's destitute and ill. She described herself as, "By blood, I am Albanian, by citizenship an Indian, by faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus."

Mother Teresa did not always receive praises from the public. She was often criticized for accepting money from people with questionable backgrounds.  She was also criticized for the quality of care in her clinics by an Indian-born physician living in England. She was criticized for her political ties. She was even called a hypocrite.  

She accepted donations from Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier (an ex-priest) in 1981. She flew to Haiti to accept the Legion d'Honneur from the right-wing dictator, who, after his ouster, was found to have stolen millions of dollars from the impoverished country.

She accepted money from the British publisher Robert Maxwell and it was later revealed he embezzled UK£450 million from his employees' pension funds. There is no suggestion that she was aware of any theft before accepting the donation.

She accepted money from American financier Charles Keating who was later charged with fraud following high profile business failures. Keating donated millions of dollars to Mother Teresa and lent her his private jet when she visited the United State.

Detractors also opposed her stand against the use of birth control in Calcutta's slums, which followed the Catholic Church’s teachings.

 After Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's suspension of civil liberties in 1975, Mother Teresa said: "People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes." These comments were seen as a result of her friendship with the Congress Party and she was widely criticized for the remarks.

She was accused of encouraging members of her order to secretly baptize dying patients, without regard to their religion. Susan Shields, a former member of the Missionaries of Charity, wrote that "Sisters were told to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a 'ticket to heaven'. An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend that she was just cooling the patient’s head with a wet cloth, while in fact, she was baptizing them, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Muslims.”

She was criticized for spending too much time and money on trying to convert people to the Catholic faith. The Assembly of God Church was supposed to have been doing more charity work in India than Mother Teresa’s organization.  

Mother Teresa died in 1997. Despite her request that all writing and correspondence be destroyed, a collection was posthumously released to the public in book form by a priest. Her writings revealed that she struggled with feelings of disconnectedness that were in contrast to the strong feelings she had experienced as a young novice. In her letters Mother Teresa describes decades of a long sense of feeling disconnected from God and lacking the earlier zeal which had characterized her efforts to start the Missionaries of Charity. As a result of this, she was judged by some to have "ceased to believe" and was posthumously criticized for hypocrisy.

All great people have their distractors. There was a lack of doctors and licensed nurses – funds are always an issue with charities.  I have seen the same situation in hospitals in Third World Countries. As far as whom she accepted funds from few charities refuse donations.  There is no reason to believe that she knew that some of the people she accepted funds from are thieves. The United States government supported Haiti’s dictator. Robert Maxwell was friends with the Royal family. Charles Keating was on the “A” list of New York socialites. Mother Teresa could not have spoken out for artificial birth control even if she had wanted to.  She was obligated to teach Catholic doctrine. Baptizing non-Christians was not right, but really what harm did she do. If you believe in baptism, she did good, if you do not believe in baptism then what difference does it make. They did nothing more than cool someone’s face. She was a ‘Catholic’ missionary her vocation was to try and bring about conversions. How do you determine how much time and money should be spent in that area? How much time and money do Protestants spend in that area?  I would expect the Assembly of God denomination to do more than Mother Teresa in India. They have the backing of ALL Assembly God Churches World Wide. The Catholic Church was not funding Mother Teresa’s ministry. The Catholic Church requires every order to be self-sustaining.

It is not uncommon for devoted Christians in ministerial work to feel at some time in their life that God is not hearing their prayers. I would say most go through a dark period that can last a very long time. I have had those periods in my life and they have lasted for years. Later in life you do not have the energy you had when you first began your ministry as a younger person. You grow tired faster and more often. If you are devoted to your vocation it is a very difficult life. Once you have an organization up and running even in the private world you experience attitude changes.

I do not believe Mother Teresa every stopped believing and she did not say that she did. She said that she could not feel God’s presence in her life for a long time. That does not mean she did not want to feel His presence and it does not mean she did not believe He was present and it certainly does not mean she no longer believed in God.

She was not a hypocrite for not sharing those feelings before she died. She must have feared it would cause distress for a lot of believers, especially her nuns, because they may not have understood, obviously some did not. I certainly did not and would not have shared my black periods with anyone. She wanted that secret carried to her grave, but she was betrayed by a priest, who had pretended for years to be her friend. In the end money from a book deal meant more than friendship. 

Those that have been critical of Mother Teresa have not accomplished near what she did for the poor. They probably do not understand what it is like to see extreme suffering and death day after day and know there is little you can do to alleviate it. There is never enough time or money. You are constantly second guessing yourself – what if I had done this or that.  I would not have turned down tainted money even if I knew it was tainted, she claims she did not know it was tainted. if I could use tainted money to help the poor and suffering I would.  I see it as taking the devil’s evil and turning it to good! 

I have gone to bed many nights not understanding peoples lack of charity and saying, “God, if everyone would only give fifty cents one time a year so much could be accomplished.” I have been where you know you are working as hard as you ever did, you see growth in the organization, you are witnessing more people being help than ever before, you are praying more, but something is missing. You begin to think something is wrong ‘with me’ and you cannot fix it. The test of your faith continues! God does allow the faithful to be tested.