Mother Teresa of Calcutta
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Mother Teresa of Calcutta |
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( 1910-1997)
Mother Teresa, born Agnes Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, she was the youngest of three children. In her teens, Agnes became a member of a youth group in her local parish. Guided by a Jesuit priest, she became interested in missionaries. At age 17, she responded to her first call of a vocation as a Catholic missionary nun. She joined an Irish order, the Sisters of Loretto, a community known for their missionary work in India. When she took the vows, she chose the name Teresa after St. Therese of Lisieux.
In Calcutta, Sister Teresa taught at St Mary's High School, and in 1944, she became the principal. Soon Sister Teresa contracted tuberculosis, was unable to continue teaching and was sent to Darjeeling for rest and recuperation. It was on the train to Darjeeling that she received her second "call". Mother Teresa recalled later, "I was to leave the Convent and world with the poor, living among them. It was an order. I knew where I belonged but I did not know how to get there."
In 1948, the Vatican granted Sister Teresa permission to leave the Sisters of Loretto and pursue her calling under the jurisdiction of Archbishop of Calcutta.
Mother Teresa started with a school in the slums to teach the children of the poor. She also learned basic medicine and went into the homes of the sick to treat them. In 1949, some of her former pupils joined her. They found men, women, and children dying on the streets who were rejected by local hospital. The group rented a room so they could care for helpless people otherwise condemned to die in the gutter. In 1950, the group was established by the church as a Diocesan Congregation of the Calcutta Diocese. It was known as the Missionaries of Charity.
In 1952 the first Home for the Dying was opened in space made available by the city of Calcutta. Over the years, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity grew from 12 to thousands serving the "poorest of the poor" in 450 centers around the world. She created many homes for the dying and the unwanted from New York to Albania. She was one of the pioneers of establishing homes for AIDS victims. In 1966. the Missionaries of Charity brothers was founded. Homes began in Rome Tanzania and Australia. In 1971 the first home in the U.S. was established in S. Bronx, NY.
Mother Teresa worked tirelessly for world peace. Her work brought her numerous awards and medals including the Noble Peace Prize in 1979. She donated the bulk of the money to feed hundreds for a year. Beginning in 1980, homes began to spread around the world for drug addicts, prostitutes, battered women, orphanages. When she returned for the first time to her native Albania (now Serbia) she opened a home in Tirana. In India the homes reached 168. At every conference she invited, she used to say: "Please don't kill the child. I want the child. Give the (unwanted) child to me."
Mother Teresa died in 1997. On Aug. 15, in a solemn celebration in the Archdiocese of Calcutta, the diocesan phase of the cause of beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta was concluded. The process now goes to the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which must complete the investigation on the sanctity of Mother Teresa's life.
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For the Poor
Make us worthy, Lord, to serve those people throughout the world who live and die in poverty and hunger. Give them through our hands, this day, their daily bread, and by our understanding love, give them peace and joy. - Mother Teresa of Calcutta
( Selected from EWTN )
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The trouble is that rich people, well-to-do people, very often don't really know who the poor are; and that is why we can forgive them, for knowledge can only lead to love, and love to service. And so, if they are not touched by them, it's because they do not know them.
We need to find God, and He cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature -- trees, flowers, grass -- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. We need silence to be able to touch souls.
Smile at each other, smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other -- it doesn't matter who it is -- and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other.
Without our suffering, our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the Redemption. All the desolation of the poor people, not only their material poverty, but their spiritual destitution, must be redeemed. And we must share it, for only by being one with them can we redeem them by bringing God into their lives and bringing them to God. Mother Teresa
Blessed
Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), Foundress of the Missionary Sisters of Charity
No Greater Love
The prayer of the children of God
In order for prayer to be fruitful, it must come from the heart and be able to
touch God’s heart. See how Jesus taught his disciples to pray. Every time we
say the “Our Father”, I believe that God looks at his hands, at the place
where he has engraved us: “Upon the palms of my hands I have written your
name.” (Isa 49:16) God contemplates his hands, and he sees us there, nestling
in them. How marvelous is God’s tenderness!
Let us pray, let us say the “Our Father”. Let us live it and then we will be
saints. Everything is there: God, myself, my neighbor. If I forgive, I can be
holy, I can pray. Everything comes from a humble heart; when we have such a
heart, we will know how to love God, how to love ourselves, and how to love
our neighbor (Mt 22:37f.). That is nothing complicated, and yet we complicate
our lives so much and make them heavy with so many extra loads. Only one thing
counts: to be humble and to pray. The more you pray, the better you will pray.
A child encounters no difficulty in expressing its ingenuous understanding in
simple words that say a lot. Didn’t Jesus give Nicodemus to understand that we
must become like a small child (Jn 3:3)? If we pray according to the Gospel,
we will allow Christ to grow in us. So pray with love, the way children do,
with the ardent desire to love much and to make beloved the person who is not
loved.
Blessed Teresa of
Calcutta (1910-1997), Foundress of the Missionary Sisters of Charity
No Greater Love
“My sheep hear my voice”
You will consider it difficult to pray if you do not know what to do. Each of
us must help himself to pray: first of all, by having recourse to silence, for
we cannot place ourselves in the presence of God if we do not practice both
interior and exterior silence. It is not easy to bring about silence within
ourselves, but this effort is indispensable. It is only in silence that we
will find a new power and true unity. God’s power will become ours, in order
to accomplish everything as is right and proper. The same will be true as
regards the union of our thoughts with his thoughts, the union of our prayers
with his prayers, the union of our actions with his actions, of our life with
his life. Unity is the fruit of prayer, of humility, of love.
God speaks in the silence of the heart. If you place yourself before God in
silence and prayer, God will speak to you. And you will know then that you are
nothing. God will only be able to fill you with himself when you know your
nothingness, your emptiness. The souls of the people who pray much are souls
of great silence.
Silence makes us see each thing differently. We need silence in order to touch
the souls of others. The essential is not what we say, but what God says –
what he says to us, what he says through us. In such a silence, he will listen
to us; in such a silence, he will speak to our soul, and we will hear his
voice.
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