Missionaries Of Charity Focused On Poor At Beatification

By CINDY WOODEN, CNS

Published: October 9, 2003

VATICAN CITY (CNS)—Many nations will have official delegations at the Oct. 19 beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but members of the Missionaries of Charity are focusing their attention on a less formal group of special guests.

Seats at the ceremony in St. Peter’s Square already have been reserved for 3,000 men, women and children who eat or sleep at the soup kitchens and shelters in Rome run by members of the order founded by Mother Teresa.

Immediately after the Oct. 19 Mass, the guests will be served lunch in the Vatican’s audience hall.

The beatification is “a celebration to give glory to God for what he has done through Mother Teresa,” said Missionaries of Charity Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, promoter of her cause. “Mother Teresa does not need our applause Oct. 19.”

Working in temporary offices set up in the Missionaries’ Rome shelter for homeless men, the priest said the Missionaries of Charity hope the beatification will cause a “ripple effect,” reminding the world of the call to serve God in the poor.

And while the tiny nun in her blue-trimmed sari would have had to force herself to smile in the midst of such attention when she was alive, “she has a different perspective now,” the priest said.

“She just wanted to be a pencil in God’s hands,” he said. “She used to say, ‘God uses nothingness to show his greatness,’” and the Oct. 19 ceremony should be focused on faith in him.

The beatification will take place on World Mission Sunday, a day Pope John Paul II usually dedicates to highlighting the Christian obligation to explicitly proclaim salvation in Christ.

While there is no doubt Mother Teresa was a “missionary” of charity and never hid her Catholic faith, winning converts to Catholicism was not the first focus of her work, Father Kolodiejchuk said.

“She wanted to proclaim the Gospel not with words, but by being a light, a radiance of God’s presence,” he said.

A month before the beatification, the Vatican and the Missionaries already had received 120,000 requests for the free tickets to the Mass.

The ceremony, Father Kolodiejchuk said, is not the result of a popularity contest or the universal Catholic Church’s posthumous recognition of Mother Teresa’s work—a Catholic version of her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize.

“People really had a sense that she was holy,” he said. “They saw Jesus in her. It was not just because of the work she did, because others do that work, too.”

Father Kolodiejchuk met Mother Teresa in 1977 and became associated with the Missionaries of Charity shortly afterward, even though the Missionaries of Charity Fathers was not founded until 1984.

As the postulator of her cause, he has spent the past four years poring over thousands of letters and speeches that she wrote and the transcripts of hours of interviews with people who knew her.

The investigation has convinced him that she not only engaged in hard, holy work, but she was a saint whose faith was heroic.

“The darkness she experienced and the private side of her faith” were what struck the priest most as he read and listened, he said.

Letters Mother Teresa had written to her spiritual directors described her sense of “interior darkness” and a feeling that after she had been so close to God and answered his call to serve the poor, God had abandoned her.

Yet, Father Kolodiejchuk said, she always affirmed her faith in God and his continuing care for her, even when she did not experience the consolation of feeling God’s presence.

Mother Teresa kept her feelings private, telling only her spiritual director. “We did not know how profound her faith was” until the letters were examined, the postulator said. “Her simplicity of faith and of expression also hid that.

“She would say, ‘Accept whatever God gives and accept whatever God takes with a smile.’ That sounds simple, but it was painful for her and profound. She was focused on her beloved and on pleasing him,” the priest said.

Father Kolodiejchuk said he believes it was no coincidence that Pope John Paul decided to preside over the beatification as part of the celebration of his 25th anniversary as pope.

“The ceremony could have been in the spring, but he chose to wait,” the priest said.

Father Kolodiejchuk agreed with those who described Mother Teresa as “the saint of this pontificate.”

“There was more than friendship between them,” he said. “There was love and esteem and trust.”

Mother Teresa’s international renown was sealed when she won the Nobel Peace Prize one year after Pope John Paul’s election.

Their very public activities around the world coincided in time, but also in the messages they conveyed, he said.

The pope’s preaching on the dignity of the human person, the value of every human life, the Christian obligation of solidarity and the central role of Christian activity nourished by prayer and the Eucharist were echoed in Mother Teresa’s life, Father Kolodiejchuk said.

In addition, he said, “She never made any important decision without consulting the pope first,” including the founding of the Missionaries of Charity Fathers.

In the end, he said, “People are fulfilled and happy when they love God and are focused outward like Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul.”