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.
Posts
