Tag Archives: Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa’s mission lives on in Kolkata, grows worldwide

Members of Mother Teresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity, stand under a photograph before the unveiling of an official canonization portrait at the John Paul II National Shrine in Washington

By Subrata Nagchoudhury and Sunil Kataria

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) – On the eve of her canonization as a Roman Catholic saint, and 19 years after her death, the order founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta is going strong – even without her charismatic leadership.

The Missionaries of Charity gained world renown, and Mother Teresa a Nobel peace prize, by caring for the dying, the homeless and orphans gathered from the teeming streets of the city in eastern India.

They also drew criticism for propagating what one skeptic has called a cult of suffering; for failing to treat people whose lives might have been saved with hospital care; and for trying to convert the destitute to Christianity.

While staying true to their cause, the Missionaries of Charity say they have responded to their detractors.

“There is no change in our way of treating the sick and dying – we follow the same rule that Mother had introduced,” said Sister Nicole, who runs the Nirmal Hriday home in the ancient district of Kalighat, the first to be set up by Mother Teresa in 1952.

The nuns no longer picked up people “randomly” off the streets, she said, and only took in the destitute at the request of police.

“Any good work will be challenged – but if the work is genuinely good it will survive such criticism and carry on to be God’s true work,” said Nicole.

PRAYER AND WORK

Hundreds of thousands are expected to gather in Rome on Sunday for a canonization service led by Pope Francis, leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, in front of St Peter’s Basilica.

Kolkata, as the former capital of the British Raj is now called, is holding prayers, talks and cultural events. But no major ceremony is planned to mark the path to sainthood for the two miracles of healing attributed to Mother Teresa.

The low-key mood reflects an often-heated debate over religious intolerance in India, a predominantly Hindu country of 1.3 billion people.

Although Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said Indians felt “proud” about the canonization, the head of a Hindu grassroots movement that supports his government provoked controversy last year by accusing Mother Teresa of seeking to convert people to Christianity. Her order denies this.

Kolkata Archbishop Thomas D’Souza played down any suggestion that Mother Teresa was not loved and respected by people of other faiths in a city that is home to 170,000 Roman Catholics.

“Mother is certainly not a goddess to them,” he told Reuters. “But she is deeply venerated and people – cutting across caste, community and creed – are respectful to her work.”

The everyday work of the Missionaries of Charity goes on, meanwhile.

 

A nun belonging to the global Missionaries of Charity reacts as she interacts with children at the Nirmala Shishu Bhavan in Inda

A nun belonging to the global Missionaries of Charity reacts as she interacts with children at the Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, a children’s home founded by Mother Teresa, ahead of Mother Teresa’s canonization ceremony in Kolkata, India August 30, 2016. REUTERS/Rupak De Chowdhuri

 

On a recent day at the spartan Kalighat home, male inmates with shaven heads and wearing green uniforms lay on bunks. Women ate in a canteen while others were cared for by volunteers.

One inmate, a man of about 40 called Saregama, had just died.

“Saregama died with dignity and care,” said Sister Nicole. “We prayed for him.”

The number of homes that the Missionaries of Charity run has grown to nearly 750 in India and abroad, from the 600 that Mother Teresa left when she died in 1997.

At Mother House, her old headquarters down a narrow lane, the mood was one of silent prayer. Inside, a notice still hung on the wall saying: “Time to see Mother Teresa: 9 am to 12 noon/3 pm to 6 pm. Thursday closed.”

Mother House still attracts visitors to India like Pedro Afonso, a lawyer from Brazil who had come with a friend for evening mass. He gave thanks for the miracles that will bring sainthood to Mother Teresa and said that, in Kolkata, she “had chosen the right place for her work and charity”.

(Writing by Douglas Busvine; Editing by Robert Birsel)

After lifetime with the poor, Mother Teresa speeds to sainthood

Mother Teresa of Calcutta greets journalists after arriving in Rome from New Delhi

By Crispian Balmer

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Affectionately called the “saint of the gutters” during her lifetime, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be made an official saint of the Roman Catholic Church on Sunday, just 19 years after her death.

A Nobel peace prize winner, Mother Teresa was one of the most influential women in the Church’s 2,000-year history, acclaimed for her work amongst the world’s poorest of the poor in the slums of the Indian city now called Kolkata.

Hundreds of thousands of faithful are expected to attend the canonization service for the tiny nun, which will be led by Pope Francis in front of St. Peter’s basilica.

Although criticized both during her life and following her death, Mother Teresa is revered by Catholics as a model of compassion who brought relief to the sick and dying, opening branches of her Missionaries of Charity (MoC) order around the world.

“Even in popular culture she’s identified with goodness, kindness, charity,” said Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the MoC priest who campaigned for her sainthood.

In novels or movies often characters say, “‘Oh, who do you think I am? Mother Teresa?'” he told Reuters.

Her critics view her differently, arguing she did little to alleviate the pain of the terminally ill and nothing to stamp out the root causes of poverty.

In 1991, the British medical journal the Lancet visited a home she ran in Kolkata for the dying and said untrained carers failed to recognize when some patients could have been cured.

Kolodiejchuk said her detractors missed the point of her mission, arguing that she had created a place to comfort people in their final days rather than establish hospitals.

“We don’t have to prove that saints were perfect, because no one is perfect,” he said.

CHRISTIANITY ‘NOT THE ONLY WAY’

In her adopted India, a primarily Hindu nation, Mother Teresa has been accused of looking to convert the destitute to Christianity – something her mission has repeatedly denied.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the umbrella right-wing Hindu organization that helped create India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), also accuses Mother Teresa of revelling in the misery of others.

“As a resident of Kolkata, I feel insulted to see its poverty being glorified by the MoC. As a Hindu nationalist I also feel that Christianity is not the only way of salvation,” said Jishnu Bose, the RSS spokesman in the city.

But Mother Teresa still has legions of supporters in India, including BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“All her life she worked to serve poorer sections of Indian society. When such a person is conferred with sainthood, it is natural for Indians to feel proud,” Modi said on Sunday in a radio broadcast.

Mother Teresa was born Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu of Albanian parents in 1910 in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire and is now Macedonia. She became a nun at 16 and moved to India in 1929, creating her mission in 1950.

The Roman Catholic Church has more than 10,000 saints, many of whom had to wait centuries before their elevation.

But Mother Teresa, one of the most recognizable faces of the 20th century, was put on the fast track to sainthood after dying of a heart attack on Sept. 5, 1997.

The late Pope John Paul II bent Vatican rules to allow the procedure to establish her case for sainthood to be launched two years after her death instead of the usual five, and she was beatified in 2003.

The Church defines saints as those believed to have been holy enough during their lives to now be in Heaven and able to intercede with God to perform miracles. She has been credited with two miracles, both involving the healing of sick people.

The latest involved a Brazilian, Marcilio Andrino, who unexpectedly recovered from a severe brain infection in 2008. He and his wife Fernanda will attend the canonization, which is considered the highlight of Pope Francis’s Holy Year of Mercy.

(Additional reporting by Philip Pullella in Rome and Subrata Nagchoudhury in Kolkata; editing by John Stonestreet)

Mother Teresa of Calcutta to be made saint in September

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a nun who dedicated her life to helping the poor, will be made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church at a ceremony on Sept. 4, Pope Francis announced on Tuesday.

Last December, he cleared the way for sainthood for the Nobel peace laureate, who died in 1997 at the age of 87 and was known as “saint of the gutters”.

Teresa, who was born Agnese Gonxha Bojaxhiu of Albanian parents in 1910 in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire and is now Macedonia, became an international figure but was also accused of trying to convert people to Christianity.

Francis, who has made concern for the poor a major plank of his papacy, was keen to make Mother Teresa a saint during the Church’s current Holy Year.

The Vatican said the ceremony would take place at the Vatican, dashing hopes of Indians that the pope would go to Kolkata, as Calcutta is now called, to perform the ritual.

“I am waiting to get there because it has been absolutely jubilant news and I can’t thank God enough that it is happening in my lifetime,” said Sunita Kumar, spokesperson for the Missionaries of Charity, the order of nuns Mother Teresa founded.

She began the order in the 1950s to help the poor on the streets of Kolkata. The religious order spread throughout the world. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

The late Pope John Paul II bent Vatican rules to allow the procedure to establish her case for sainthood to be launched two years after her death instead of the usual five. She was beatified in 2003, a mere six years after her death.

In the time since her death, some have accused Mother Teresa and the order of having ulterior motives in helping the destitute, saying their aim was to convert them to Christianity.

The order rejects that, saying, for example, that most of those helped in the Kalighat Home for Dying Destitutes in Kolkata were non-Christians with just a few days left to live and noting that conversion is a lengthy process.

The Church defines saints as those believed to have been holy enough during their lives to now be in Heaven and can intercede with God to perform miracles. She has been credited in the church with two miracles, both involving the healing of sick people.

(Reporting By Philip Pullella; editing by Ralph Boulton; Editing by Ralph Boulton)

Vatican Admits Consideration of Canonization of Mother Teresa

A Vatican spokesman has confirmed that Mother Teresa could be canonized during the Jubilee for Mercy in 2016.

Fr. Federico Lombardi said nothing has been formally scheduled but that her canonization is “a working hypothesis.”

“There is no official date but you can say that the Congregation for the Causes of Saints is studying the cause,” Fr. Lombardi told Catholic News Agency.

A celebration of the life of Mother Teresa has been scheduled as part of the events for the Jubilee of Mercy.  The possible canonization would take place the day before the scheduled remembrance on September 5, 2016.

September 4th is scheduled to be a day of jubilee for workers and volunteers of mercy.

The canonization for Teresa has significant support within the church.

“Who more than Mother Teresa can be recognized today as one who lived the works of mercy, and who more than she could be capable of sustaining the commitment of millions of people – men, women, youth – in various forms of volunteer work express the beauty of the mercy of the Church?” Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization said.

The Vatican admits planning would be necessary for a canonization because over 300,000 people came to the Vatican for Teresa’s beatification ceremony in 2003.