'Tiny Bit Of Pencil' With Which God Wrote -Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa's heart, sustained by a pacemaker inserted in December 1989, finally gave out Sept. 5 , while she was at her home surrounded by members of her order. Although she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she was best known for her work among the poor and destitute of Calcutta, India. One day she will no doubt be known as St. Teresa of Calcutta.
She had the distinction of being unofficially canonized in her lifetime. 1975 was the annus mirabilis: She made the cover of Time magazine with the caption "Living Saints - Messengers of Hope for our Time," and Malcolm Muggeridge made a television program about her.
She became a familiar international figure in her sandals and white sari with blue edgings, a crucifix at the left shoulder. She was a conscience-prodding reminder of death in the streets of Calcutta and of Third World poverty. A fundraising lunch presided over by Britain's Prince Philip tactfully consisted of one meager course.
She upbraided Margaret Thatcher about Londoners reduced to living in what she called "coffins of cardboard boxes." She found the poverty of the First World even more incomprehensible than that of the Third World. It was the sign of a callous society that had lost all sense of human community.
As staunchly anticommunist as Pope John Paul II, she nevertheless responded to President Mikhail Gorbachev's invitation to open a house in Moscow. Her sisters, known as the Missionaries of Charity, were among the first to arrive in Yerevan, Armenia, after the earthquake of 1988.
Mother Teresa, originally Agnes Bojaxhiu, had come a long way from Skopje (south of Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia), where she was born Aug. 26, 1910. At 19 she left for India via Ireland to become a nun in the Congregation of Loreto. For 15 years she taught geography and history to middle-class girls at St. Mary's High School, Calcutta. She became headmistress and was also put in charge of a group of Indian sisters, known as the Daughters of St. Anne. They wore blue saris.
On a train to Darjeeling in September 1946, she had what she described as a "call within a call." She later explained, "The message was clear. I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order." But that was more easily decided than done.
The local archbishop was soon convinced of her sincerity and determination. Always a practical woman, she learned nursing and dispensary work in Patna on the banks of the Ganges and began to gather her first helpers. The Vatican proved harder to persuade. Because there are so many already, new religious orders of women are discouraged.
Mother Teresa had to prove that she could gather recruits and keep them. For the first 10 years, she was not allowed to work outside her own diocese, Calcutta. The work developed in three directions.
First, Kalighat, a hospice for the dying, was set up on the grounds of a Hindu temple. So as not to be overwhelmed, the sisters took in only those brought by the police -- the most abandoned. More than 30,000 have passed through Kalighat and have been helped to die a humane death.
Next came the Sishu Bhavan, or children's home. Stories about babies being rescued from trash cans are not false. But more commonly they were found abandoned in doorways or outside convent gates.
Then Mother Teresa opened a home for lepers. It can take 200 - a small fraction of India's 2 million lepers.
After 1960, the work began to expand throughout India to Ranchi, Jhansi, Delhi and Bombay. In Delhi she got in touch with government leaders. A garlanded Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru came to visit her children's home. "Shall I tell you about my work?" she asked. "No," said Nehru. "I know about it. That is why I have come."
She became a figure on the national scene. Although life was being made hard for expatriate Christian missionaries, Mother Teresa seemed to transcend religious divisions and to belong to everyone. She never used denomination tests for anything. She was given a free travel pass on Indian railways and -- by Indira Gandhi in 1973 -- on Indian Airways.
Pope Paul VI's visit to Bombay in 1964 marked another stage in her progress. Paul heard about her work and donated to her the car he had used in India, a white Lincoln. It was raffled off. Her name was made. Mother Teresa was launched on the international scene.
She had failures and disappointments. The sisters -- known as Missionaries of Charity -- were thrown out of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and snubbed in Belfast. They have worked in Africa, Jordan, among the aborigines of Australia and in the suburbs of Rome. But they did not take hold in Latin America.
Mother Teresa was tempted to blame this failure on Latin American theologians of liberation, who believe they should deal with the structures of society rather than just tinker with the works. This was always the most basic objection to what she was doing: One should deal with the causes as well as the effects of poverty and proclaim justice as well as charity.
Mother Teresa's reply was that the sisters were "outside politics" and that to change society, one had to begin somewhere. She began on the pavements of Calcutta, where there were 100,000 homeless. To her mind, a single act of love or gratitude was sufficient justification for all her work. She wanted to do -- in a phrase picked up by Muggeridge -- "something beautiful for God."
In 1976 the Missionaries of Charity celebrated their 25th anniversary. They numbered 1,133 nuns and 200 novices. In addition, there was the male congregation, the Missionary Brothers of Charity, who number about 160. For canonical reasons, they are independent, but they acted under Mother Teresa's inspiration.
No less important in her eyes were the 40,000 laypeople known as the Co-workers of Mother Teresa, now more than 3 million worldwide. They pray for the Missionaries of Charity and send them supplies and medicines. The circles expand still more to embrace the sick who offer their sufferings for the work and the contemplatives who pray for it.
In 1976 Mother Teresa spoke at the Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia to mark the American bicentennial. She appeared on the platform alongside Archbishop Helder Camara of Recife in northern Brazil, another contemporary canonized unofficially by popular acclaim. Although she was not a great speaker, her tiny figure radiated great energy, rugged charm and an indefinable sense of God's presence.
In the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, she began to be exploited as "the good nun." She was invited to the 1980 synod on marriage to denounce abortion and contraception, which she did. She went to Beirut in 1983 as the pope's emissary. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a leading Vatican official, said after her death he expected the official canonization process to proceed rapidly because "she was so resplendent in the eyes of everyone."
She visited trouble spots and famine areas on behalf of the pope and was cast in the role of spokeswoman for papal causes. Feminist she was not. She had a spirit of Franciscan poverty and claimed a low opinion of herself. She compared herself to "God's pencil - a tiny bit of pencil with which he writes what he likes." Asked, "What next after Mother Teresa?" she answered simply, After Mother Teresa, the Missionaries of Charity."
They won't have it easy. A saint is a hard act to follow.
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