Pope Beatifies Mother Teresa, Offers Thanks For Her Witness, Courage

By CNS

Published: October 23, 2003

VATICAN CITY (CNS)—Pope John Paul II offered his thanks to Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, founder of the Missionaries of Charity, for being close to him in her lifetime and for courageously showing the world what it means to love and serve Jesus completely.

“The venerable servant of God, Teresa of Calcutta, from this moment on will be called blessed,” the pope said at the Oct. 19 beatification Mass as the crowd burst into applause.

In the homily he wrote for the ceremony, the 83-year-old pope said: “We honor in her one of the most relevant personalities of our age. Let us accept her message and follow her example.”

For the first time at a major event, Pope John Paul did not read even one line of his own homily. A Vatican official said that with the pope’s difficulty speaking clearly, the crowd would not have been able to understand much of his message, so others were asked to read for him.

St. Peter’s Square and the surrounding streets were a crush of some 300,000 pilgrims and admirers of Mother Teresa.

Under a bright sun, which weather forecasters had said would not appear, the scene was awash with vibrant colors: flags from dozens of countries, banners in languages from Polish to Hindi, the blue-trimmed saris of the Missionaries of Charity, and the colorful traditional dress of Guatemalans and Nigerians.

In an unusually personal homily, read by a Vatican aide and by Indian Cardinal Ivan Dias of Mumbai, the pope wrote, “I am personally grateful to this courageous woman, whom I always felt was alongside of me.

“An icon of the good Samaritan, she went everywhere to serve Christ in the poorest of the poor. Not even conflicts or wars could stop her,” the pope wrote.

Mother Teresa was beatified in record time—just over six years after her death—because Pope John Paul set aside the rule that a sainthood process cannot begin until the candidate has been dead five years.

Like the pope, many people in the crowd knew Mother Teresa, volunteered in one of her homes or soup kitchens, or at least heard her speak when she came to their home towns.

They carried official posters as well as their own photographs of the small, stooped nun who died in 1997.

Jack Griffith, 42, of Menasha, Wis., was with a group doing a “saints pilgrimage” around Italy.

“For us, Mother Teresa is important because she is a saint of our own time,” he said. “Her mission of mercy was among the poorest of the poor, and in that way she was countercultural.

“She shunned everything and focused on two things: Jesus in the Eucharist and serving the poor,” Griffith said.

Before the Mass began, pilgrims swapped stories about when they met Mother Teresa or recounted tales of her audacity: For example, when a bank offered her $1 million, she said it was not enough; she wanted $2 million.

Retired Australian Cardinal Edward I. Cassidy, former president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, was among the attendees with a story. He was a secretary in the Vatican Embassy in India from 1955 to 1962, the early years of the Missionaries of Charity.

“She was a frequent visitor,” coming to inform the nuncio of her plans and occasionally asking for help, he said.

“The nuncio and I kept saying, ‘Go slowly. You are building for the future, build solidly,’” the cardinal said.

Cardinal Cassidy returned to Calcutta, India, in 1975 to celebrate Mass with Mother Teresa and her sisters to mark the 25th anniversary of the Missionaries of Charity.

“She said, ‘Remember when you used to tell me to go slowly? I always went away thinking, ‘You’d think the representative of the Holy Father and his secretary would have more faith.’ That was her little dig at us,” the cardinal said.

The congregation at the beatification Mass included official delegations from the Orthodox Church of Albania, Albania’s Sunni and Bectascian Muslim communities, and from 26 governments, including the United States, the Canadian province of Quebec, India, Albania and Macedonia.

Aferdita Berisha, 35, a Muslim from Kosovo, said: “All the good things Mother Teresa did cannot be divided according to faith. She helped everyone who needed help, regardless of religion.”

Several royal guests were seated not far from 2,000 people who eat or sleep at the missionaries’ facilities in Rome.

The royals included Queen Fabiola of Belgium, Princess Mona of Jordan, Princess Elena of Romania and Prince Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, the former Italian royal family.

In his homily, Pope John Paul wrote that Mother Teresa’s life was “a radical living and a bold proclamation of the Gospel.”

“Her life is a testimony to the dignity and the privilege of humble service,” he said. “Her greatness lies in her ability to give without counting the cost, to give ‘until it hurts.’”

Pope John Paul appeared to be doing the same thing. What little he read during the Mass, he read with great strain. But after Mass, he stayed on the stage for 20 minutes greeting members of the official delegations, then rode through the massive crowd in an open popemobile.

The pope met Oct. 20 with Sister Nirmala Joshi, Mother Teresa’s successor as superior of the order, and with hundreds of Missionaries of Charity and pilgrims who had come to Rome for the beatification.

Mother Teresa, he told them, “was one of the greatest missionaries of the 20th century,” a missionary who preached the Gospel around the world “with daily gestures of love for the poorest.”

Mother Teresa was born to Albanian parents in 1910 in what is now Macedonia; in 1946, she experienced a call to found the Missionaries of Charity and live among the poorest of the poor in Calcutta.

Mother Teresa—always smiling—rapidly expanded the order and opened hospices, clinics and shelters around the world, but her letters to her spiritual directors express a feeling that God had abandoned her.

“Mother Teresa shared the passion of the Crucified One, particularly during her long years of ‘interior darkness,” the pope wrote in his homily. “In the darkest hours, she clung with even greater tenacity to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.

“This harsh spiritual struggle allowed her to identify even more with those she served every day, experiencing the pain and even rejection they felt,” he wrote.

Retired Cardinal Ersilio Tonini of Ravenna-Cervia, Italy, told Italian television: “She was strong. She commanded. She knew how to organize. She was very intelligent.

“Often we think of saints as people who are half-stupid, who go around in a fog,” he said. “Mother Teresa was real, practical. She had great courage.”

The people participating in the processions, readings and dances at the Mass included active and contemplative nuns, contemplative brothers and priests belonging to the various branches of the Missionaries of Charity, as well as lay co-workers and children adopted from the Missionaries’ orphanages.

As a brother carried a reliquary containing some of Mother Teresa’s blood to the altar, 10 young Indian girls in gold-trimmed white saris danced in procession; the girls were adopted by Italian families.

Maria McMurtrie and her mother, Sandy, of Bethesda, Md., represented the Americas in the offertory procession, carrying a painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe with the pope and Mother Teresa.

Sandy McMurtrie adopted Maria, who has Down syndrome, from a Missionaries of Charity orphanage in Mexico. Mother Teresa was Maria’s godmother.

After the Mass, the 2,000 poor who were special guests at the Mass were offered a luncheon in the Vatican’s audience hall.

In a simple setting, with chairs but no tables, they ate lasagna, chicken, peas, bananas and dessert.