My Most Admired Mother Next to My Own Mother

Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa (born Agnes Gonk Bojaxhiu) (August 27, 1910 – September 5, 1997), Bharat Ratna, OM, was an Albanian Roman Catholic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity in India. Her work among the poverty-stricken in Kolkata (Calcutta) made her one of the world's most famous people. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in October 2003.

Born in Uskub, Ottoman Empire (now Skopje, in the Republic of Macedonia), at 18 she left home to join the Sisters of Loretto. In 1962, she received the Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding. In 1971, she was awarded the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize and St. Gabriel award. Teresa was also awarded the Templeton Prize in 1973, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980. She was awarded the Legion d'Honneur by Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1981. She was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985, was made an Honorary Citizen of the United States (one of only two people to have this honor during their lifetime) in 1996, and received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1997. She was the first and only person to be featured on an Indian postage stamp while still alive.

Early Years In Skopje

Agnes was born in the centre of Skopje on 27 August 1910 to Albanians Nikollë and Dranafille Bojaxhiu, her father originally from Mirdita (North Albania) and her mother from Gjakovo (Kosovo). Raised as a Catholic by her parents, her father died when she was still only 10 years old. She decided she would become a nun at the age of 12.

The beginnings of the Missionaries of Charity

In October, 1950 Teresa received Vatican permission to start a diocesan congregation, which would become the Missionaries of Charity, whose mission was to care for (in her own words) "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone." It began as a small order with 13 members in Calcutta; today it has more than 4,000 nuns running orphanages, AIDS hospices, and charity centers worldwide, and caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless and victims of floods, epidemics and famine on all six continents.

In 1952 the first Home for the Dying was opened in space made available by the City of Calcutta. With the help of Indian officials she converted an abandoned Hindu temple into the Kalighat Home for the Dying, a free hospice for the poor. She renamed Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart (Nirmal Hriday). She soon opened a home for those suffering Hansen's disease, commonly known as leprosy, and called it Shanti Nagar (City of Peace). An orphanage followed. The order soon began to attract both recruits and charitable donations, and by the 1960s had opened hospices, orphanages and leper houses all over India. She was one of the first to establish homes for AIDS victims.
Teresa's order started to rapidly grow, with new homes opening all over the globe. The order's first house outside India was in Venezuela, and others followed in Rome and Tanzania, and eventually in many countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe, including Albania.

By the early 1970s, Mother Teresa had become an international celebrity. Her fame can be in large part attributed to the 1969 documentary Something Beautiful for God which was filmed by Malcolm Muggeridge and his 1971 book of the same title, which is still in print. During the filming of the documentary, footage taken in poor lighting conditions, particularly the Home for the Dying, was thought unlikely to be of usable quality by the crew. After returning from India, however, the footage was found to be extremely well-lit. Muggeridge claimed this was a miracle of "divine light" from Mother Teresa herself. Others in the crew thought it more likely ascribable to a new type of Kodak film. Muggeridge later converted to Catholicism.

President Ronald Reagan presents Mother Teresa with the Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony, 1985.
In 1971 Paul VI awarded her the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize. Other awards bestowed upon her included a Kennedy Prize (1971), the Balzan prize (1979) for humanity, peace and brotherhood among peoples, the Albert Schweitzer International Prize (1975), the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom (1985) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1994), honorary citizenship of the United States (November 16, 1996), and honorary degrees from a number of universities. In 1972 Mother Teresa was awarded the Nehru Prize for her promotion of international peace and understanding.

In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, "for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitute a threat to peace." She refused the conventional ceremonial banquet given to laureates, and asked that the $6,000 funds be diverted to the poor in Calcutta, claiming the money would permit her to feed hundreds of needy for a year. She is stated to have said that earthly rewards were important only if they helped her help the world’s needy. When Mother Teresa received the prize, she was asked, "What can we do to promote world peace?" Her answer was simple: "Go home and love your family." In the same year, she was also awarded the Balzan Prize for promoting peace and brotherhood among the nations.

In 1982, Mother Teresa persuaded Israelis and Palestinians, who were in the midst of a skirmish, to cease fire long enough to rescue 37 mentally handicapped patients from a besieged hospital in Beirut.

When the walls of Eastern Europe collapsed, she expanded her efforts to communist countries that had rejected her, embarking on dozens of projects. She was undeterred by criticism about her firm stand against abortion and divorce saying, "No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work."

Mother Teresa travelled to help the hungry in Ethiopia, radiation victims at Chernobyl, and earthquake victims in Armenia.

In 1991, Mother Teresa returned for the first time to her native region and opened a Missionaries of Charity Brothers home in Tirana, Albania.

By 1996, she was operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries. Over the years, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity grew from 12 to thousands serving the "poorest of the poor" in 450 centers around the world. The first Missionaries of Charity home in the United States was established in the South Bronx, New York.
Spiritual life

Analyzing her deed and achievements, John Paul II asked: "Where did Mother Teresa find the strength and perserverance to place herself completely at the service of others? She found it in prayer and in the silent contemplation of Jesus Christ, his Holy Face, his Sacred Heart."[1]

In his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI mentioned Teresa of Calcutta three times and he also used her life to clarify one of his main points of the encyclical. "In the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta we have a clear illustration of the fact that time devoted to God in prayer not only does not detract from effective and loving service to our neighbour but is in fact the inexhaustible source of that service."

A Franciscan influence

Although there was no direct connection between Mother Teresa's order and the Franciscan orders, she was known as a great admirer of St. Francis of Assisi. [2] Accordingly her influence and life show influences of Franciscan spirituality.

Her sisters say the peace prayer of St. Francis every morning before breakfast and many of the vows and emphasis of her ministry are similar. St. Francis emphasized poverty, chastity, obedience and submission to Christ. He also devoted much of his own life to service of the poor, especially lepers in the area where he lived. [3]
Deteriorating health and death.

In 1983, Teresa suffered a heart attack in Rome, while visiting Pope John Paul II. After a second attack in 1989, she received a pacemaker. In 1991, after a battle with pneumonia while in Mexico, she had further heart problems.

She offered to resign her position as head of the order. A secret ballot vote was carried out, and all the nuns, except herself, voted for Mother Teresa to stay. Mother Teresa agreed to continue her work as head of the Missionaries of Charity.

In April 1996, Mother Teresa fell and broke her collar bone. Later that year, in August, she suffered from malaria, and failure of the left heart ventricle. She underwent heart surgery, but it was clear that her health was declining. On March 13, 1997 she stepped down from the head of Missionaries of Charity and died on September 5, 1997, just 9 days after her 87th birthday.

The Archbishop of Calcutta, Henry Sebastian D'Souza, said he ordered a priest to perform an exorcism on Mother Teresa shortly before she died because he thought she was being attacked by a devil. [4]

At the time of her death, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity had over 4,000 sisters, an associated brotherhood of 300 members, and over 100,000 lay volunteers, operating 610 missions in 123 countries. These included hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children's and family counseling programs, orphanages, and schools.

Mother Teresa was granted a full state funeral by the Indian Government, an honor normally given to presidents and prime ministers, in gratitude for her services to the poor of all religions in India. Her death was widely considered a great tragedy within both secular and religious communities. The former U.N. Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, for example, said: "She is the United Nations. She is peace in the world." Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan said that Mother Teresa was "A rare and unique individual who lived long for higher purposes. Her life-long devotion to the care of the poor, the sick, and the disadvantaged was one of the highest examples of service to our humanity."

Influence in the world

Mother Teresa at the inaguration of the Mother Theresa Womens University in Tamil Nadu with Chief Minister M.G.Ramachandrann and J&K Chief Minister Farook Abdullah

Mother Teresa's work inspired other Catholics to affiliate themselves with her order. The Missionaries of Charity Brothers was founded in 1963, and a contemplative branch of the Sisters followed in 1976. Lay Catholics and non-Catholics were enrolled in the Co-Workers of Mother Teresa, the Sick and Suffering Co-Workers, and the Lay Missionaries of Charity. In answer to the requests of many priests, in 1981 Mother Teresa also began the Corpus Christi Movement for Priests. Today over one million workers worldwide volunteer for the Missionaries of Charity.
During her lifetime and after her death, Mother Teresa was consistently found by Gallup to be the single most widely admired person, and in 1999 was ranked as the "most admired person of the 20th century." Notably, Mother Teresa out-polled all other volunteered answers by a wide margin, and was in first place in all major demographic categories except the very young.

Miracle and beatification

Following Teresa's death in 1997, the Holy See began the process of beatification, the second step towards possible canonization, or sainthood. This process requires the documentation of a miracle performed from the intercession of Mother Teresa. In 2002, the Vatican recognized as a miracle the healing of a tumor in the abdomen of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, following the application of a locket containing Teresa's picture. Monica Besra said that a beam of light emanated from the picture, curing the cancerous tumor.

The issue of the alleged miracle proved controversial in India around the time of Mother Teresa's beatification.[5] Teresa was formally beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 19, 2003 with the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. A second miracle is required for her to proceed to canonization.

According to The Daily Telegraph, Besra's husband initially said that the tumor was cured by medical treatment. He is quoted as saying: "This miracle is a hoax. It is much ado about nothing. My wife was cured by the doctors." He later changed his mind, however, and told an interviewer: "It was her miracle healing that cured my wife. Our situation was terrible and we didn't know what to do. Now my children are being educated with the help of the nuns and I have been able to buy a small piece of land. Everything has changed for the better."[6] According to Monica Besra in TIME Asia,[7] records of her treatment were removed by a member of the order from the hospital and are now with a nun.

Critics

Critics of Mother Teresa, namely Christopher Hitchens, Aroup Chatterjee, and Robin Fox, have argued that her organization provided substandard care, and were primarily interested in converting the dying to Catholicism, and used donation for missionary activities elsewhere, rather than being spent on improving the standard of healthcare. These critics represent a small minority but have voiced strong objections to Mother Teresa's virtue. The Catholic Church has dismissed most of these criticisms. For example, the idea that missionaries would spend money on missionary activities seems obvious and Mother Teresa never claimed her activities to be about health care.
Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens wrote that Mother Teresa's own words on poverty proved that "her intention was not to help people." Hitchens further alleged that Mother Teresa lied to donors about what their contributions were to be used for. In 1994, Hitchens published an article in The Nation entitled "The Ghoul of Calcutta". Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, the author of "Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict" (2003), asserted that the public image of Mother Teresa as a helper of the poor, the sick, and the dying was misleading and overstated; he maintains the number of people who are served by even the largest of the homes is not nearly as large as westerners are led to believe. [1]

Hitchens was the only witness called by the Vatican to give evidence against Mother Teresa's beatification and canonization process, as the Vatican had abolished the traditional "Devil's Advocate" role that filled a similar purpose.[8]

Mother Teresa made some public statements regarding political leaders that have produced controversy even in Catholic media.[citation needed] 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 approving comments were seen as a result of the friendship between Teresa and the Congress Party. (Chatterjee, p. 276). In 1981, she made a trip to Haiti to accept an honor from Jean-Claude Duvalier, who was notorious as a repressive kleptocrat, and praised the Duvalier family as friends of Haiti's poor. In 1989, she travelled to Albania and laid a wreath at the grave of Enver Hoxha, the nation's Stalinist leader throughout the Cold War era, who had outlawed religion and sometimes brutally repressed religious expressions, including those of the Catholic Church. [citation needed]
Robin Fox

In 1991, Dr. Robin Fox, the editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, visited the Home for Dying Destitute in Calcutta and described the medical care the patients received as "haphazard". Dr. Fox criticised Teresa claiming that her order did not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, putting curable patients at risk.

Fox conceded that the regimen he observed included cleanliness, the tending of wounds and sores, and kindness, but he noted that the sisters' approach to managing pain was "disturbingly lacking". The formulary at the facility Fox visited lacked strong analgesics which he felt clearly separated Mother Teresa's approach from the hospice movement. Fox also wrote that needles were rinsed with warm water, which left them inadequately sterilized, and the facility did not isolate patients with tuberculosis.
Aroup Chatterjee
Aroup Chatterjee stated, that none of the eight facilities that the Missionaries of Charity run in Papua New Guinea have residents living there; their sole use is converting people to Catholicism. He also questioned the number of people who Mother Teresa claims to help at her facilities.
Other
Mother Teresa has garnered criticism for her encouragement of sacramental baptisms being performed on the dying (a majority of which were Hindus and Muslims), thus converting them to the Catholic faith. In a speech at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego, California in January, 1992, she said, "Something very beautiful... not one has died without receiving the special ticket for St. Peter, as we call it. We call baptism 'a ticket for St. Peter.' We ask the person, do you want a blessing by which your sins will be forgiven and you receive God? They have never refused. So 29,000 have died in that one house [in Kalighat] from the time we began in 1952."
The Catholic Church's response to criticism
In the process of examining Teresa's suitability for beatification and canonization, the Roman Curia (the Vatican) pored over a great deal of documentation of published and unpublished criticisms against her life and work. Vatican officials say Hitchens' allegations have been investigated by the agency charged with such matters, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and they found no obstacle to Mother Teresa's canonization. [9] Due to the attacks she has received, some Catholic writers have called her a sign of contradiction. [2]
Commemoration


Memorial plaque dedicated to Mother Teresa at a building in Václavské náměstí square in Olomouc, Czech Republic.
Memorial Museum of Mother Teresa
A memorial room (museum) was opened in the Feudal Tower in Skopje, a building in which she used to play as a child. The museum has a significant selection of objects from Mother Theresa’s life in Skopje and relics from her later life. In the Memorial room there is a model of her family home, made by the artist Vojo Georgievski.

Next to the Memorial room, there is an area with the image of Mother Theresa and her prayer as well as a memorial park and a fountain.
Memorial plaque where Mother Teresa’s home stood
Just at the edge of Skopje’s city mall is the place where the house of Mother Theresa used to stand. The memorial plaque was dedicated in March of 1998 and it reads: “On this place was the house where Gondza Bojadziu - Mother Theresa - was born on 26 August 1910”. Her message to the world is also inscribed: “The world is not hungry for bread, but for love”
Mother Teresa Day in Albania
Mother Teresa Day (Dita e Nënë Terezës) on October 19 is a public holiday in Albania.
Mother Teresa in Kosovo
The main street in Kosovo`s capital Pristina is called Mother Theresa Street (Rruga Nëna Terezë)
See also
Missionaries of Charity
Kalighat Home for the Dying
Rinas Mother Teresa Airport
[edit] Further reading
Navin Chawla: Mother Teresa (Element Books) 1996 ISBN 1-85230-911-3
Becky Benenate, Joseph Durepos (eds) Mother Teresa: No Greater Love (Fine Communications, 2000) ISBN 1-56731-401-5
Aroup Chatterjee: Mother Teresa. The Final Verdict (Meteor Books, 2003). ISBN 81-88248-00-2, introduction and first three chapters on fourteen (without pictures). Critical examination of Agnes Bojaxhiu's life and work.
Bijal Dwivedi, Mother Teresa: Woman of the Century
Malcolm Muggeridge Something Beautiful for God ISBN 0-06-066043-0
T.T.Mundakel, Blessed Mother Teresa: Her Journey to Your Heart. ISBN 1-903650-61-5. ISBN 0-7648-1110-X. Book Review.
Kathryn Spink, Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography. ISBN 0-06-250825-3.
Mother Teresa et al, Mother Teresa: In My Own Words. ISBN 0-517-20169-0.
Walter Wüllenweber, "Nehmen ist seliger denn geben. Mutter Teresa — wo sind ihre Millionen?" Stern (illustrated German weekly), September 10, 1998. English translation.
Bindra, Satinder. "Archbishop: Mother Teresa underwent exorcism", CNN.com World, 2001-09-07. Retrieved on 2006-10-23.
[edit] References
^ John Paul II (2003). ADDRESS OF JOHN PAUL II TO THE PILGRIMS WHO HAD COME TO ROME FOR THE BEATIFICATION OF MOTHER TERESA. Retrieved on 2006-03-07.
^ Mother Teresa of Calcutta Pays Tribute to St. Francis of Assisi
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_assisi
^ Archbishop: Mother Teresa underwent exorcism. CNN, September 7, 2001
^ http://www.southend.wayne.edu/days/2003/October/10202003/nation/india/india.html. Retrieved on December 5, 2005.
^ Telegraph: News: Medicine cured 'miracle' woman - not Mother Teresa, say doctors. Retrieved on December 5, 2005.
^ TIME Asia Magazine: What's Mother Teresa Got to Do with It? -- Oct. 21, 2002. Retrieved on December 5, 2005.
^ Christopher Hitchens, " Less than Miraculous." Free Inquiry Magazine, Volume 24 Number 2.
^ LIVING SAINT: Mother Teresa's fast track to canonization The San Fancisco Chronicle. October 12, 2003