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Mother Teresa: 1910-1997
"It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish."
Those who are materially poor can be very wonderful people. One evening we went out and we picked up four people from the street.
And one of them was in a most terrible condition. I told the Sisters:
"You take care of the other three; I will take care of the one who looks worse."
When I pick up a person from the street, hungry, I give him a plate of rice, a piece of bread. But a person who is shut out, who feels unwanted, unloved, terrified, the person who has been thrown out of society - that spiritual poverty is much harder to overcome. - Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa led a life of hard work and love
Friday, September 12, 1997
CALCUTTA, India (AP)
The nuns gathered around Mother Teresa's body lifted their heads from prayer, then rose and began straightening up the church. The new head of the order, Sister Nirmala, busied herself rearranging misplaced chairs.
Dr. Patricia Aubanel, who met Mother Teresa while caring for orphans in Mexico and later became her physician, said the nun's spirit lives on in the sisters' mission.
"They're always working - always this constant activity. This is the discipline, the legacy that Mother Teresa left," she said.
For Mother Teresa, work - among the poor, the ill, the dying and the hopeless - was a sort of prayer. With that simple ethic and an energy that often amazed others, she built a few schools and poor houses in Calcutta's slums into the Missionaries of Charity, with about 4,000 nuns and monks running more than 500 schools, clinics, hospices, orphanages and other projects around the world.
"When I wash a leper's wounds I feel I am nursing the Lord himself," she once said, echoing the biblical admonition from Matthew: "As long as you did it to one of these, the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to Me."
Her death on Sept. 5 was mourned by world leaders. The Dalai Lama, a fellow Nobel Peace laureate, called her "a living example of the human capacity to generate infinite love, compassion and altruism."
Indian Prime Minister I.K. Gujral compared her to Mohandas Gandhi, the "mahatma," or "great soul" who led an earlier fight against poverty in India. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican's secretary of state, said sainthood likely would be relatively swift.
The most moving tributes, though, came from the "poorest of the poor," to whom Mother Teresa dedicated her life.
During the week her body lay in state at St. Thomas' Church, street sweepers clutching flowers lined up to pay their respects. A beggar with legs crippled by polio used his arms to drag himself into the church to gaze at Mother Teresa's body, wrapped in the white, blue-trimmed sari she adopted as her order's habit, head resting on a satin pillow.
She was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, in what is now Macedonia, in 1910. She came to Calcutta to teach as a novitiate of the Loreto order in 1929. Soon after taking her final vows and the name Teresa, after the patron saint of missionaries, she witnessed India's brutal famines of the 1940s that left millions dead.
Mother Teresa said she heard a call from God to devote her life to the "poorest of the poor" in 1946. A year later, she left her Loreto convent to live among the poor.
She wandered Calcutta slums in search of children to teach, sick to heal, hungry to feed. And she attracted followers, so many that she soon had to move out of the tenement rooms where she had settled after leaving her convent.
Pope Pius XII recognized her order, the Missionaries of Charity, in 1950. A few years later she had her own convent, a building on the edge of a slum where the order's headquarters still are located. Mother Teresa died in her simple room at the convent, surrounded by nuns who said her last words were, "Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I love you."
She was to be buried at the headquarters on Saturday.
It was to the convent she returned after trips to Ethiopia, Chernobyl, Armenia, South Africa - spreading her message of work and love to the world's trouble spots.
In 1982, at the height of the siege of Beirut, Mother Teresa persuaded the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas to stop shooting long enough for her to rescue 37 children trapped in a hospital on the front line.
Through it all, she maintained a philosophy that was conservative in its most basic sense. The crushing weight of India's population crisis never swayed her from her opposition to abortion and birth control. The overwhelming poverty of Africa never turned her into a social revolutionary. She ministered to the world as she found it, insisting there was dignity there.
"The poor give us much more than we give them," she once said. "They're such strong people, living day to day with no food. And they never curse, never complain. We don't have to give them pity or sympathy. We have so much to learn from them."
A 1994 British television documentary, "Hell's Angel: Mother Teresa of Calcutta," criticized her for accepting contributions from controversial figures such as Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier.
Mother Teresa brushed aside accusations of impropriety. For her, the poor could benefit from a despot's generosity, and he would benefit from the giving.
"No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work," she said.
Her quick, broad smile and frail figure masked a strong will. But in her later years, Mother Teresa was slowed by poor health.
She tried to step down as head of her order in 1989, saying, "God will find another person, more humble, more devoted, more obedient to him, and the society will go on."
She was re-elected superior general against her wishes, bringing into the open fears that her life's work could not survive without her.
Her health only worsened. In 1996, she fell and broke her collarbone and survived bouts of malaria and pneumonia, and the failure of her left heart ventricle. Finally, last March, she was allowed to retire.
Instead of resting, Mother Teresa then seemed driven to ready her order for her last departure, her doctor said.
Aubanel said she tried to dissuade Mother Teresa from plans to introduce her successor, Sister Nirmala, to the pope. Mother Teresa bought the airline tickets and took Aubanel along to Rome in May. Next was New York to welcome new nuns into the order, then Washington where she gave a speech to Congress despite excruciating back pain linked to a degenerative bone disorder.
The only voyage that eluded her was to China, where Aubanel said Mother Teresa long had dreamed of opening projects. But then in July, Hong Kong - where the Missionaries of Charity was already active - reverted from British to Chinese control.
"She told me, 'You know, I'm in China now,"' Aubanel recalled of one of their last conversations. "So then I thought: Mother has accomplished everything."
Members of the Missionaries of Charity insist the order will thrive as a living tribute. Even as they mourned, her nuns continued to toil, bathing the dying in a homeless shelter, teaching job skills to lepers at a colony, praying with children at an orphanage, and tidying the church where their founder lay in final rest.
