St. Theresa of Calcutta (September 5th)
Sept 3 -- Saint Gregory the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church
Sept 5 -- Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Virgin
Sept 5 – Bl. Maria Starace, OSM, Foundress of the Servite Compassionist Sisters
Sept 6 - Bl Bonaventure of Forli, OSM
Sept 7 -- TWENTY-THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (Year C)
I’ve decided to write about, St Teresa of Calcutta (aka Mother Teresa).
Certainly, in my younger days there was probably no one more revered as a _living saint_ than Mother Teresa.
She is also, as yet, the _only_ saint that I personally met – at a lovely young professed gathering held in a random classroom at the Pontifical North American College in Rome on a random Saturday morning while I was studying in at my Servite Order’s college at the Marianum in Rome. There were only about 30 of us met and talked to Mother Teresa in said random classroom on that day.
I have a picture of St. John Paul II’s forehead, as his motorcade passed by the laboratory where I was working / studying, then as a chemist at the University of Southern California, in 1987, when the Pope was visiting Los Angeles. However, I never met him. I did, however, meet St. Mother Teresa and I was able to talk to her at that meeting above.
There are, of course, stacks of books and even higher stacks of articles that have been written about St. Mother Teresa. She was both practical and prophetic – she left the Sisters of Loreto, because she found them too rigid in terms of outreach toward the poor who she could hear outside the convent walls in India where she served, but was not allowed to do much more than simply pray for them.
On the other hand, I would question her “practicality” (or certainly whether it was her highest concern) as she created a religious Congregation that has made no pretense of knowing or even searching for “solutions” for poverty or famine. Her congregation(s) - the Missionary Sisters (and Brothers) of Charity are simply dedicated to accompanying the poor, walking with them, even and especially at their end.
I saw this first hand in Rome, helping with other Seminarians to prepare a meal for about 50 (and only 50) of Rome’s homeless population out of a soup kitchen that she was very proud of having created at the Vatican. (At the gathering where I heard her speak she smiled that she kinda shamed Pope John Paul II into letting her congregation open a soup kitchen at the Vatican asking him once, “How is it that St. Peter’s in Rome doesn’t have a soup kitchen?” And John Paul II soon made it happen).
However, it has been both fascinating and instructive to me that neither Mother Teresa nor her sisters’ congregation running that soup kitchen had any interest in making a dent “homelessness in Rome” or even in greatly improving the material quality of life for Rome’s poor.
One could imagine that every restaurant in the city would have _been honored_ to “cook for Mother Teresa’s soup kitchen.” She / they turned this down. Instead, they asked for 10-20 boxes of _garbage_ from some of the local markets and restaurants, and we were accompanied as we made a meal out of that, again, not for thousands, but for 50.
To give the reader an idea, each week we were invited to make a fruit salad out of 2-3 boxes of discarded oranges and another 2-3 boxes of discarded lettuce. One would think that this would be easy: just pick the good oranges and the good heads of lettuce and discard the rest, except they were all rotting. Our task was to carve out the still fresh pieces of the oranges and the lettuce and throw away the parts that were truly already rotten.
I’ve used the experience in many a homily on “transubstantiation” telling congregants, that for a year, I was invited to participate each Saturday evening in the transformation of garbage into a meal – a meal that, of course, we were invited to eat (and we did) as well.
This is clearly _not_ an approach to _solve_ the problem of poverty. It’s an invitation to respect even the rotting elements around us as good creations of God. And the parts that were irretrievable, by this logic, we were invited to mourn. Everyone and everything mattered.
In the 1980s, Mother Teresa sent her sisters to help out with refugees of the Ethiopian Famine. A fellow Servite, who was a mentor to me, in my younger days, worked with her in his capacity of working for Catholic Relief Services.
Her Congregation again caused something of a kerfuffle there as they would focus on the lonely and the dying, with some openly smirking that they weren’t doing much at all.
To this Mother Teresa responded, in her “arm of steel under a velvet glove” approach: “While you sip your brandy and discuss ‘what should be done’ we are ensuring that after you figure out what to do there will be at least some people left for you to save. (And in the meantime we’re treating the dying kindly as well).”
So there are of course many, many people who _adore_ Mother Teresa, and there are others who despise her as someone who drew a lot of attention in times of crisis, attention which perhaps could have been put to use in more practical ways.
Still, no one would deny that she cared, and the members of her Congregation cared, and that they continue to be focused on the “poorest of the poor,” the _people now_ (put aside the oranges) that almost everyone else would discard.
St. (Mother) Teresa (of Calcutta), pray for us …
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