Mother Teresa declared a saint before huge crowds in the Vatican

Mother Teresa declared a saint before huge crowds in the Vatican

I recall the day that “the saint of the gutters” told me, “Your Poverty Is Greater Than Ours”

By Dan Wooding, Founder of ASSIST News Service

VATICAN CITY (ANS – September 4, 2016) -- Mother Teresa, the Skopje, Macedonia-born nun, known for her work amongst the poor, for which she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, was declared a saint in a canonization Mass held by Pope Francis in the Vatican before huge crowds gathered in St. Peter’s square, on Sunday (September 4, 2016) morning.

Mother Teresa, who came from an Albanian heritage, was awarded the coveted Nobel Peace Prize “for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitutes a threat to peace.”

According to CNN, Pope Francis delivered the formula for the canonization of the world-famous nun, and applause broke out before he completed the formula of canonization, in which he declared “Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a saint.”

Speaking in Latin, Francis said that “after due deliberation and frequent prayer for divine assistance, and having sought the counsel of many of our brother bishops, we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a saint, and we enroll her among the saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole church.”

Catholics -- including hundreds of blue-and white-robed nuns from the Missionaries of Charity sisterhood founded by Mother Teresa -- had gathered without thousands of others from around the world to attend the canonization of the church’s newest “saint,” just 19 years after her death.

A huge portrait of Mother Teresa, whom the church credits with having performed two miraculous cures of the sick, hung from St. Peter's Basilica during the colorful ceremony.

Because I am an evangelical and believe that people should only pray to God via his son, Jesus, I have decided to call her instead, the “Saint of the Gutters” in this story.

So, learning of the news of her canonization, the event brought back memories of the time I was able to interview the great lady in Calcutta back in 1975.

It came about after an American, Dr. Lonnie Rex, the then head of the David Livingstone Foundation, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had called me at my London, England, newspaper office and said that he had heard of my overseas reporting missions, and wondered if I would be free “to fly to India” to report on their work there, and also interview Mother Teresa at her headquarters in the Missionaries of Charity home in central Calcutta*. (He then wanted me to go onto to Bangladesh to see their work there and also interview Muhammad Mansur Ali, then then Prime Minister of the country, which I did. Tragically, shortly after the interview, on August 15, 1975, the Prime Minister was assassinated along with his family by a group of military officers. Also brutally massacred on that same day was the founding father and President of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, his wife and 14 other members of his family by the same Army men.)

I had first become aware of Mother Teresa after viewing “Something Beautiful for God,” an inspiring BBC TV documentary made in 1970 by British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, who had gone to Calcutta to film her work. Having been an agnostic up until then, the experience turned his life around and he became a follower of Jesus Christ and was soon given the title of “St. Mugg” by the cynical British media.

Years later, Mr. Muggeridge did me the great honor of sending me a lovely letter thanking me for co-authoring a book called “Uganda Holocaust” (with Ray Barnett), which he said had really “moved and inspired” him. “St. Mugg” also said in his letter, “Thank you for bringing to the world’s attention, the plight of the courageous Ugandan believers who suffered such terrible persecution at the hands of Idi Amin.”

Mother Teresa’s words still live with me today and so, as we reflect on our present world of hate, unspeakable violence and suffering, I thought I would share with you about my meeting with this extraordinary woman who was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, on August 27, 1910. Her family was of Albanian descent and, and despite being from such a lowly family, she certainly did a huge amount to alleviate the pain and suffering of her time.

At the age of twelve, the then Agnes strongly felt the call of God. She knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ. At the age of eighteen she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After a few months’ training in Dublin she was sent to India, where on May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun.

From 1931 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta, but the suffering and poverty she glimpsed outside the convent walls made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta.

Although she had no funds, she said that she would depend on “Divine Providence,” and started an open-air school for slum children. Soon she was joined by voluntary helpers, and financial support was also forthcoming. This made it possible for her to extend the scope of her work.

On October 7, 1950, Mother Teresa received permission from the Holy See to start her own order, “The Missionaries of Charity,” whose primary task was to “love and care for” those persons nobody was prepared to look after. In 1965 the Society became an International Religious Family by a decree of Pope Paul VI.

A giant to the have-nots of life

When Mother Teresa first came into the tiny room where we were to conduct the interview, I soon realized that that, although she was small in stature -- she stood only 4-foot-11-inches tall and weighed less than 100 pounds -- she was someone who had already spent many years of her life lifting and carrying those who were dying or sick. She fed, washed, and cared for anyone who needed assistance, and to her millions of supporters, she was a giant to the have-nots of life that she ministered to during her six decades on the subcontinent of India, as well as others around the world.

In fact, despite her fame, her real friends were the starving, the dying, and the poor.

As a then a relatively young and still learning-on-the job reporter with the West London-based weekly, the Middlesex County Times (where my ANS colleague, Michael Ireland also worked for a time,) I immediately warmed to this gentle woman, for she had seen more poverty than anyone I had ever met.

Speaking in the founding, festering slum where she made her simple home, I was surprised to hear her express pity for the “poverty-stricken West.”

“The spiritual poverty of the Western World is much greater than the physical poverty of our people,” she told me, as the simple fan whirred above us, vainly trying to alleviate the unbearable heat of that Indian city, the capital of India’s West Bengal state.

Emptiness

Mother Teresa went on to say, “You, in the West, have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. They feel unloved and unwanted. These people are not hungry in the physical sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don't know what it is.

“What they are missing, really, is a living relationship with God.”

Mother Teresa cited the case of a woman who had died alone in her home in Australia. She stated that the woman’s body lay for weeks before being found, and the “cats were actually eating her flesh when she was discovered.

Turning her piercing eyes on me, she said, “To me, any country which allows a thing like that to happen is the poorest. And people who allow that are committing pure murder. Our poor people would never allow it.”

Then she continued, saying that the teeming millions of the poor of the developing world have “a lesson” to teach us in the affluent West.

“They can teach us contentment,” she said, her leathery face gently breaking into a faint smile. “That is something you don’t have much of in the West. I’ll give you an example of what happened to me recently. I went out with my sisters in Calcutta to seek out the sick and dying.

Gratitude

“We picked up about 40 people that day. One woman, covered in a dirty cloth, was very ill and I could see it. So I just held her thin hand and tried to comfort her. She smiled weakly at me and said, ‘Thank you.’ Then she died. She was more concerned to give to me than to receive from me. I put myself in her place and I thought what I would have done. I am sure I would have said, ‘I am dying, I am hungry, call a doctor, call a Father, call somebody.’ But what she did was so beautiful. I have never seen a smile like that. It was just perfect. It was just a heavenly gift. That woman was more concerned with me than I was with her.”

Starving

Mother Teresa, who had a wonderful way of making you feel you were the most important person in the world when you were talking to her, then shared another incident.

“I gave another poor woman living on the streets a bowl of rice,” said Mother Teresa. “The woman was obviously starving and she looked in wonder as I handed it to her. “She told me, ‘It is so long since I have eaten.’

“About one hour later, she died. But she did not say, ‘Why hasn't God given me food to eat,’ and ‘why has my life been so bad?’

“The torture of hunger and pain just finished her, but she didn't blame anybody for it. This is the greatness of our poor people.”

Mother Teresa added: “We owe a great debt of gratitude to those who are suffering so beautifully. They teach us so much.”

She also told of her battle against abortion in Calcutta. “We have sent word to clinics, hospitals and police stations, not to destroy babies, but to send them to us and we will give them to families who want them.

“At birth, we arrange for adoption also to foreign countries, as well as in India.”

As I concluded my conversation with Mother Teresa, I flushed as I asked Mother Teresa her age at that time, and she told me: “There is no need to be embarrassed. I'm 64.”

Then she added, with a twinkle in her eye: “I'm getting old now aren't I? But it's a wonderful thing to be able to spend all those years doing something beautiful for God.”

This incredible Catholic nun, revered for her tireless dedication to the world’s most wretched, died on Friday, September 5, 1997 surrounded by grieving sisters of her order. She was 87 and she left this earth having done many “beautiful things” for God.

What an example she was to all of us and that was the one interview I will never forget!

Still, Mother Teresa wasn’t perfect. Since her death, Mother Teresa has remained in the public spotlight. In particular, the publication of her private correspondence in 2003 caused a wholesale re-evaluation of her life by revealing the crisis of faith she suffered for most of the last 50 years of her life.

According to the Bio website (http://www.biography.com/), she wrote in one despairing letter to a confidant, “Where is my Faith -- even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness -- My God -- how painful is this unknown pain -- I have no Faith -- I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart -- & make me suffer untold agony.” While such revelations are shocking considering her public image, they have also made Mother Teresa a more relatable and human figure to all those who experience doubt in their beliefs.”

The Bio website, however, went on to say, “For her unwavering commitment to aiding those most in need, Mother Teresa stands out as one of the greatest humanitarians of the 20th century. She combined profound empathy and a fervent commitment to her cause with incredible organizational and managerial skills that allowed her to develop a vast and effective international organization of missionaries to help impoverished citizens all across the globe.

“However, despite the enormous scale of her charitable activities and the millions of lives she touched, to her dying day she held only the most humble conception of her own achievements.”

The website said that, summing up her life in characteristically self-effacing fashion, Mother Teresa said, “By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus.’”

* India renamed the city of Calcutta to Kolkata in 2001 to match the Bengali pronunciation. But the Catholic Church uses the spelling of Calcutta in its references to Mother Teresa.

Photo captions: 1) Dan Wooding with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. 2) Pope Francis praised Mother Teresa as a model of compassion to Catholics worldwide. 3) Malcolm Muggeridge who made the BBC TV documentary on Mother Teresa that changed his life. 4) Nuns from the Missionaries of Charity in St. Peter’s Square. 5) Mother Teresa with a child. 6) Dr. Lonnie Rex, who set up Dan’s interview with Mother Teresa, at an Oklahoma City bookstore with a copy of his autobiography. 7) Dan Wooding with many of the 45 books he has authored or co-authored (OC Register).

About the writer: Dan Wooding, 75, is an award-winning winning author, broadcaster and journalist who was born in Nigeria, West Africa, of British missionary parents, Alfred and Anne Wooding, who then worked with the Sudan Interior Mission, now known as SIM. He now lives in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he has been married for some 53 years. They have two sons, Andrew and Peter, and six grandchildren who all live in the UK. Dan is the founder and international director of the ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS), and is also the author of some 45 books. Dan, who has interviewed many world leaders, also has a weekly radio show (Front Page Radio) and two TV shows (Windows on the World -- with Mark Ellis, and Inside Hollywood with Dan Wooding) all based in Southern California. You can write to Dan Wooding at assistnews@aol.com .

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