Blessed Mother Teresa, 1976

A Saint in Action

In April of 1976 Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the world's most famous Catholic religious sister, was scheduled to be in Chicago for the National Catholic Educational Association convention. she had become known for taking in dying, destitute lepers and others living in the gutters and alleys of Calcutta, India. That news created excitement in Davenport, Iowa, only 160 miles to the West.

The city's Catholic Interracial council jumped at the opportunity to offer her it is Pacem in Terris Award and ask her to visit Davenport. She agreed. On April 23 the Assumption High School gymnasium was packed with hundreds waiting to hear the tiny Albanian woman with the magnetic story.

"I am glad to be with you," she said, "because I see that you also want to love until it hurts, the way Jesus loved. Pray for us and together we will grown in holiness." Journalists covering her in Davenport probed her for "solutions" to poverty in India and across the world. She responded by noting that she doesn't "get involved in politics." She merely does "what Jesus said: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give," adding: "We are not social workers."

Asked what she thinks is the most beneficial part of her work, she said: "The greatest thing in human life, to me, is to die in peace with God, and this is very beautiful." Without more practical, concrete examples of her work--something beyond picking poor beggars off the street--, Mother Teresa left many people, including the journalists present, wondering how to capture this "very beautiful" thing she spoke of. Normal language seemed inadequate. Father John Smith, a history professor at Davenport's St. Ambrose College and CIC president, offered a view beyond the ordinary practical: "Mother Teresa has become the symbol of the kind of humanity and faith which may well be necessary to root out poverty and racism in all parts of the world" (emphasis added).

The little Albanian nun had lit a lamp of integrated humanity and faith in India and then, with her religious community, sprinkled its light into more than 120 nations around the world. But what she represented, her priorities, turned out to be most challenging to the practical mind: love first, do "something beautiful," then greet change in God's time.

For a picture of Mother Teresa's way, imagine a big, old warehouse-like building. Simple metal cots fill a space bigger than a basketball court. In the cots are people awaiting death, most of them middle-aged and beyond. They are the forgotten and discarded of the city. No nurses or doctors are present; only a few women in white saris, the garment common to women in India. They move among the cots, bringing water, a smile, a word, a touch, at times perhaps medication. But ordinary medicine is not their vocation. Their medicine is the presence, the smile, the personal touch of love.

Three years after her Davenport visit, Mother Teresa was given the Nobel Peace Prize. In her work, the Nobel Committee said, "the most wretched have received compassion without condescension." This language appeared to be another struggle to describe activity os simple loving care. It began in Skopje, Albania, on August 26, 1910, with the birth of Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, one of three girls in a middle class Catholic family. During her school years, young Agnes heard stories of missionaries carrying the Gospel around the world. She dreamed of doing that, and by the age of 18 determined that she had a vocation "to give the life of Christ to people." Much later, after she had joined the Sisters of Loreto, gone to India, spent nearly 20 years teaching young children and then started her own Missionaries of Charity partly to raise up children in another way, she was asked if she missed having her own children.

"Naturally, naturally, of course," she responded. "That is the sacrifice we make. This is the gift we give to God." There were some who thought that neither Mother Teresa herself nor her work were desirable gifts. Christopher Hitchens, a noted British atheist writer, attacked her in the 1990s as "not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty," he declared, "a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud."

Hitchens and others were especially offended because personal attention, not medical and political intervention, was the way of the sisters. One critic noted "cleanliness, the tending of wounds and sores and loving kindness" by the sisters, but very little pain management. This all reflected part of a reality admitted by Mother Teresa, who once described her community as ""The most disorganized organization in the world". Still, she was seen as a saving saint by those who were picked out of gutters, cleaned and cared for by that community.

As fierce as her dedication to personal attention and care for the destitute, Mother Teresa was just as focused on using everything that came her way to expand her ministry to the destitute. She had plans for the Nobel Prize money of 90,000 British pounds, of course, but she also canceled a planned Nobel banquet to gain another 3,000 pounds. Another 36,000 pounds was raised by Norwegian young people for use, making a total of nearly $200,000 at the time.

The sisters figured that money would build 200 homes for lepers. Mother Teresa's health began to fail in the 1990s, so she began shifting leadership of the community to others. She designated Sister Normal, a longtime companion and convert from a Hindu family, as her successor and allowed herself unusual periods of rest. She died on Sept. 5, 1997, at her house the city now named Kolkata. Her body was first laid out in the chapel of the motherhouse where only invited guests came to pay respects.

A week later her body was taken through the streets of the city on the same gun carriage that had carried Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to a state funeral Mass with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican Secretary of State, among the concelebrants. Afterward, in a private ceremony, she was laid to rest in the motherhouse.

Pope John Paul II had been one of Mother Teresa's strong supporters. He quickly placed her on a Vatican "fast track" toward sainthood. In 2016 the process was completed and his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, formally declared the "Ma" of India's poor a saint. Among the thousands gathered for that ceremony in Rome's St. Peter's Square were 51 pilgrims from the Davenport diocese.

By that time the Missionaries of Charity had grown to nearly 5,000 members in over 130 countries ministering in more than 700 homes for the dying, for lepers, for children and for the aged poor. While other communities of religious were declining and dying, Mother Teresa's missionaries blossomed.

In her 1976 visit to Davenport, the little Albanian sisterheft a tantalizing question hanging. During a news conference at the Moline airport when she landed, a reporter noted India's poverty and asked for her thoughts on why that existed. Mother Teresa said, "Where there are great riches you also have great poverty." No one asked her to expand on that assertion.

A short while later she said, "in every place where there are rich people there must be poor people." Again, no followup question.

Minute later she said, "If there are rich, there must be poor, also" (her emphasis). And she continued: "Because it is there, we must face it, but we don't want to face it-- and very often we do nothing for it."

When has a famous person offered us a more provocative thought?