Editorial

A True Agent of God’s Mercy

Posted

Pope Francis gave the Church a special Christmas gift last week—and a birthday gift to himself—by approving a miracle that clears the way for Mother Teresa to become a saint.

We rejoice in the news, and look forward to celebrating the legacy of one of the 20th century’s most influential and recognizable Catholic women when she is canonized.

Though her formal title is Blessed Teresa of Kolkata, bestowed after her 2003 beatification, she will always be Mother Teresa to her legion of admirers.

On Dec. 17, his 79th birthday, the pope announced his approval of the second miracle attributed to her intercession—the unexplained cure of a Brazilian man with multiple brain abscesses.

The canonization date was not announced, but is expected to be Sept. 4, the day before the 19th anniversary of her death in 1997.

We think it’s fitting, too, that the door to Mother Teresa’s sainthood was opened just a little more than a week after the pope opened the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica to begin the Holy Year of Mercy.

For who better to illustrate the belief and practice of God’s mercy than the wizened nun with the crinkly smile and sparkling eyes, who made it her life’s mission to give hands-on care and comfort to the “poorest of the poor.”

Starting with her work caring for dying street people in the most destitute slums of Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, the special calling of the ethnic Albanian religious attracted similarly committed people to join her as lay volunteers or as members of the order she founded, the Missionaries of Charity.

Today, the work of the Missionaries goes on around the world, with 4,500 sisters, brothers and priests and a large number of lay volunteers.

Wearing their distinctive white saris with blue-striped trim, the sisters of the order are a familiar presence in urban centers.

With active and contemplative branches, they’ve been a treasured part of the life of New York for decades, quietly serving in places and situations that are avoided by others. The order’s first home in the United States was established in the South Bronx at a time when much of that area was a burned-out, crime-ridden wasteland.

The home is still there, and is the order’s North American headquarters.

Helped by volunteers from around the country, members based in the Bronx serve in the soup kitchens, emergency shelters and children’s programs that the Missionaries run in the community.

In the late 1980s, when AIDS burst onto the scene as a strange and frightening mystery, the Missionaries opened the Gift of Love in Greenwich Village, the first home for men with AIDS, many of them intravenous drug users with nowhere else to go. Today, the Missionaries count among their programs an emergency shelter in Harlem for women who were victims of domestic violence.

They do, in other words, what Mother Teresa taught them to do.

“What is my thought?” she once said. “I see Jesus in every human being. I say to myself, ‘This is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This is sick Jesus. This one has leprosy or gangrene; I must wash him and tend to him.’ I serve because I love Jesus.”

A saint, indeed.