THE “MOTHER TERESA PHENOMENON”

(Personal impressions and opinions)

                                                                               By Fernando do Rego

          Today, the peoples of Macedonia, where she was born on 26-8-1910, in Skopje, a nondescript village, and the peoples of our India, rejoice. They include people of every level of society, from millionaires to the millions of hungry, of lepers and of abandoned persons whom she and her Missionaries of Charity cared for along these five decades. It is today that, at the “Piazza San Pietro” in the Vatican, Pope John Paul II will proclaim her as “BLESSED TERESA OF KOLKATA”!

         Years back, I was sent on duty to Kolkata. Could I afford to miss visiting Mother Teresa? It would be like going to Rome and not seeing the Pope! So I did make it to the Mother House of the Sisters of Charity in Lower Circular Road. It was a poor leper sitting on his haunches on a footpath that with his finger-less hand pointed out to me the direction. Disappointment awaited me: carried on her wings of love more than on those of the plane flying her, this “Angel of the slums” had left for the U.S.! I do not have the text of her address at the Eucharistic Congress at Philadelphia; but I shall probably not be wrong if I guess that, both by her words and by her person, Mother Teresa, true to her special call, gave a very simple yet forceful message to the effect that Eucharist without real and effective concern for the poor and abandoned is no Eucharist at all!

I was not to have the joy of meeting her, it is true. But I felt privileged to go round and see “love in action” in favour of the poorest, hungry, rejected and neglected, of suffering humanity, in the various centres of her apostolate in “Anand Nagar”, which Dominique de Lapierre has described so vividly in his book “LA CITÉ DE JOIE” (“The City of Joy”, translated into various languages). I marvelled at the cheerfulness and courage of her Missionaries of Charity as they mingled among and served “the poorest of the poor”  - all types of them. This was not just a rhetorical expression, but the stark reality. The spirit of the Foundress had surely passed on to her companions.

THE FAMILY PLANNING APOSTOLATE

I confess I was taken by surprise also as I saw – this was, of course, way back in 1976 - that Religious Sisters, with appropriate charts (which in days past would have shocked the pious eyes of nuns!), were teaching poor uneducated slum-dwellers the symptothermic-mucus method of birth-control at the service of a responsible parenthood, according the teachings of the Catholic Church!

I inquire from Sister Paulette of Mauritius, who kindly takes me round, if this method has been full proof, and if any outside authority had given his/her opinion on the same. After admitting a lapse of some 0.5% due mostly to wrong understanding of the wife’s graphics or to the husband demanding his conjugal rights when there should have been abstention, she gifts to me the paper presented by Dr. Ajoy Kumar Gosh, Prof. Of Gynaecology and Obstetrics in the “National Medical College” of Kolkata, presented to the “National Conference of Family Planing in New Delhi” in Set.1975. After a detailed study in the various centers of Mother Teresa, he concludes: “It helps to achieve a responsible parenthood based on an educated awareness and acceptance of the cyclic phases of fertility and infertility and loving abstinence in the married life”

My thought goes to another apostle of our country and I ask Sr. Paulette how Gandhiji would react to these their activities. She shows me another paper called “Study of a New Family Planning project in a Calcutta slum” by Dr. Amrit Anand Das of the “Gandhian Institute of Studies”-Varanasi. He states categorically: “Combining family planning with general social work for the upliftment of the poor conforms to the Gandhian principle of treating the one to be lifted as a TOTAL PERSON.”

AN ECHO OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

                After this visit to the cradle of her apostolate, I also read much about its impact across the world, in the service of the poor of all the nations, whatever their sufferings. No form of human suffering repelled her; rather, every form drew her to it, to them – the suffering sisters and brothers, little ones, old ones, starving ones, lepers of all ages and stages of the dreadful disease, those dying on the streets... Surely Mother Teresa was implementing in a striking degree Jesus’ commandment of love. But, somehow, to me her work and the way she carried out her special mission seemed to actualize also that slogan of the French Revolution: “LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ”. For, enjoying complete “Liberty” to give the benefits of her apostolate in countries under the most different political ideologies, she strove to give, as much as her particular vocation could offer, “freedom” or “liberation” from hunger, disease, poverty and rejection to all those who needed her maternal care. All the while, she considered millionaires, politicians, dictators, VIPs on the same level of  “Equality”, because, for her, all were Children of God, with their own virtues and their sins. And not only did she go to each person in a true fraternal movement of love, but in her apostolate in Kolkata she developed a relationship of real “Fraternity” and fraternal cooperation with the Communist Party under the leadership of Jyoti Bosu, her devoted friend and admirer. Their ideologies were similar, even though their methodologies differed.

SHOWERS OF AWARDS

        Already in life she had been the recipient of 124 awards that Governments of various countries and various highly reputed organizations or foundations had bestowed upon her. She even received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1979. And to this woman who, Macedonian by birth but Indian by her free choice since 1950, offered  to our Motherland her love and her unstinted services, our own Indian Government awarded the “PADMA SHRI” (‘Magnificent Lotus’) in 1962 and also the BHARAT RATNA (‘Jewel of India’) in 1980.

But when she expired on 5-9-1997, she was given a “State Funeral” by the Government of India. Not counting Pandit Nehru who died as Prime Minister, only the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, had this privilege. Was the Indian Government confirming thereby that this fair-skinned no-longer-foreigner Teresa should somehow be recognized as the... “Mother of the Nation”?! For, indeed, our country’s teeming poor, India’s true representatives (more than all those officially appointed and our politicians and bureaucrats) took her as their Mother! ... The funeral was attended by VIPs from all over the world. But the real VVIPs that paid their last homage to her, were they not, surely, the weeping orphaned “poorest of the poor” from the slums of Anand Nagar, and of various countries of the world that could follow the funeral rites thanks to television?!

THE GOOD SAMARITAN OF THE 20^th CENTURY

        How can we explain this real “Mother Teresa phenomenon”? And why is she being beatified today, so soon after her death? Actually, setting aside the prescribed 5 years lapse after the death of a “candidate” for beatification, the Pope permitted the process of her beatification to be started sooner: how are we to explain this exception?

      I venture to propose the following, which seems to me a plausible explanation:

Mother Teresa became, during her own earthly life, (could I not say it without fear of being challenged?) a missionary more widely known, respected and cherished than any other Christian giant not only of recent times, but in the 20 centuries of Christian history.

But is she God’s only privileged person to perform the works she did and that her Sisters are carrying on? Far from it! Throughout the centuries and even in today’s world, Mother Teresa’s own, countless are the persons God has been using to let them be, and to let them take, His immense Charity to the poor, the forsaken and the forlorn, to the lepers and all types of sick, to the orphans and the handicapped, to the oppressed and the enslaved...

Also, Mother Teresa with her work is by no means the only and complete answer to the social needs of today: very many others are actively involved, and very meritoriously too, in this huge task, having even gone so far as to shed their blood for this Great Cause, even in our India.

What makes her special, then? I for one wouldn’t dare (would anyone?) to compare sanctities: that is God’s secret. But God is infinitely free in His decisions, isn’t He? He seems to have chosen Mother Teresa to radiate powerfully throughout the globe in the 20th Century the never-to-be-forgotten sisterly-brotherly approach to human needs, a compassionate and totally selfless attitude of mind and heart in the search for solutions to this multifaceted and “himalayan” problem.

The 20th Century has been a century of paradoxes: the ever-rising curve of enormous progress in the most diverse fields of human activity, and the parallel equally rising curve, locally and globally, of enormous imbalance and oppression in the racial, social, economic... fields.

From this paradox, from this yawning and widening chasm, has sprung a THIRST in humanity’s conscience: the thirst to create on Earth a “new” society, in which persons will receive just and fair treatment, without any discrimination of colour, race, religious convictions, or sex, with a special solicitude for those who are in any way the least favoured.

All this, undoubtedly, as also  ─ in the midst, surely, of enormous difficulties of change in her life-style and of other interior and exterior trials, which, I think, are not yet widely known ─ the tremendous goodwill and cooperation from the public, the impressive patronage extended to her by the “Great” and the most favoured in society and in the Church and the material help she received from them ─ all in a degree far superior to that ever known to any other apostle of charity ─ contributed to the “phenomenon”, to the mission that God had entrusted to Mother Teresa in today’s world. So then, in this divinely chosen context, she became, with her personal charisma and with her work, a universal symbol that awakens human consciences, a symbol that has been largely accepted, revered and loved everywhere.

Mother Teresa did speak to educated audiences, even to forums like the United Nations. But I have not heard of any contribution Mother may have made to our world by philosophical, theological, sociological discussions. Rather than discuss issues, she felt called, and chose, to act. Rather than discuss issues, she felt called, and chose, to act. Her life and work proclaimed aloud this message, absolutely essential to the search of solutions to any and all of our socio-economic problems: always see first the human face of our fellow-humans, the suffering face of a sister or brother, a child of God - much worthy of every individual’s and society’s respect and attention in whatever physical, social, religious classification he/she may be listed. She had learnt it from Jesus. She lived His Gospel in its deepest message of divinely compassionate and active love. Is this not a much needed and an exceptionally opportune contribution to our world?

Even well-meaning critics do find several limitations in Mother Teresa’s activity or even “vision”. I am not qualified to endorse or contradict their opinions. Every human being, even the most charismatic personality, is limited. But no one will deny that her slim figure could not hide, but rather did reveal, her large heart. People could see that in this slender frame was hidden a fearless, bold heart of a woman in love with humans, concrete flesh and blood. People watched her life: divested of all comfort and security, it was, like that of her Guru Jesus, one of being completely at the service of her needy neighbour, “of the least, the last and the lost in society”. These are those whom most of us, even religious-minded persons, usually ignore and pass by, unaffected by their plight. Twenty centuries ago Someone who was unequalled in this art and most qualified for it painted a vivid word-portrait of Mother Teresa of Kolkata. As per that portrait, we may call Mother Teresa “the Good Samaritan of the 20^th Century”. Only symbolically, of course, for there are countless such others in all walks of life, hidden and known to God alone.

It should not surprise us, then, that her life and work drew the attention of millions, of great and small people. She is a symbol that brings a response to the thirst of modern humanity. A symbol that is a call and a challenge. How many of us are going to listen to that call and take up the challenge is something I cannot guess, but history will unfold... In any case, our generation is responsible for the course it chooses to take

A BEATIFICATION IN A HURRY?

And what are we to say or think of, how are we to explain, the “hurried Beatification”? Some would favour it, others not so.

Could it have been a consequence of the... acquired velocity of the “phenomenon”?

In the Catholic Church, Beatification or Canonization are not meant to give glory to the Beatified or Canonized persons ─ it is God who has already glorified them by letting them share His own glory ─ or to “raise them to the honours of the altar” – according to the (in my opinion) unhappy and incorrect expression that has entered our Catholic vocabulary. By making their heroic lives shine before us humans the Church must desire that the Heavenly Father alone be glorified: this is the explicit teaching of Jesus (Mt 5/16). Example attracts and stimulates far more strongly than words.

Beatification and Canonization also place before us Christians these heroes and heroines of Christian life as examples one can safely follow in the footsteps of Jesus. To imitate them thus, each according to her or his special calling, will be the best way, a truly authentic way, of “giving glory to our Heavenly Father”.

Could this “hurried Beatification”, then, due for this 19^th of October 2003, draw us Christians and, consequently, others too, to tread enthusiastically in the footsteps of Mother Teresa? May it be so indeed...

 And here we are on the threshold of this 19th of October, at the dawn of a great solemnity opening with the bells ringing joyfully! Having seen, smelled, touched personally the “reality” of those Kolkata slums, I am impelled to exclaim:

Oh slums of KOLKATA! Filthy and repelling you may be, but it was in you that she plunged into her heroic adventure of love, impelled by a divine force, by a burning and unquenchable fire, to carry her Christian Love to your hungry, rejected and dying. So now you are rightly re-christened “Anand Nagar”, truly “City of Joy”! 

Oh KOLKATA, rejoice and unite your voice to those of the Universe in the hosannas that ring out today from the “Piazza San Pietro”, praising God for

BLESSED TERESA OF KOLKATA !