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 Beautification of Mother Teresa (Scott 1245, 2003) Canonization of Saint Teresa of Calcutta (Scott 1628, 2016) On September 5, the Church celebrates the memorial of Sain Teresa of Calcutta (today known as Kolkata). As with the subject of yesterday's Daily Email (Blessed Pope John Paul I), for most readers, Mother Teresa lives in our recent memory and remains a powerful symbol of service to the poor and forgotten. Vatican City has honored her twice with the issuance of stamps. The stamp commemorating her beatification (Scott 1245), issued in 2003, included a label with the following quote: If you are humble, nothing will touch you.And, a stamp celebrating her canonization was issued in 2016 (Scott 1628). Agnes Bojaxhiu was born in 1910 in Skopje, now North Macedonia, then part of the Ottoman Empire. She once described herself as: "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."Agnes first arrived in India in 1929, and would spend the majority of her life there. She began her novitiate in Darjeeling, in the lower Himalayas, and took her first religious vows on May 24, 1931 and her solemn vows on May 14, 1937. She worked primarily as a teacher but, in 1946, experienced a "call within the call" and began her work with the destitute and sick. Her missionary work began in earnest in 1948 and, in 1950, her order, the Missionaries of Charity, was founded, dedicated to ‘the poorest of the poor.’ The order adapted as its habit the now-recognized simple, white sari with a blue border. The order's mission, in her words, would be that: "it [would care for] the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone."She went on to also open hospices for the dying and for those with leprosy and AIDS. A Missionary Brothers of Charity was established in 1963 and a contemplative branch in 1976. By 2007, 450 brothers and 5,000 sisters were affiliated with the Missionaries of Charity in 120 countries around the world. The Missionaries of Charity were formed because of the poor she encountered in Calcutta and her overwhelming desire to help them. Mother Teresa was criticized by some in India and outside that country, mostly for what some regarded as her simple approach to the overwhelming plight of the poor she encountered and for her acceptance of suffering as a part of the human condition. Dawn Marie Beutner writes that others were ‘mystified by her deep faith in Christ.' The atheist Christopher Hitchens called her ‘a friend of poverty,’ not a friend of the poor. Others denigrated her because of her opposition to abortion. She also suffered from ‘an absence of the presence of God’ during prayer and contemplation. This lasted for decades, until in her later years when she said the ‘darkness lifted.’  President Ronald Reagan Presents Mother Teresa with the Medal of Freedom, White House Rose Garden, June 20, 1985 From Wikimedia Commons, in the Public Domain Mother Teresa received many honors from organizations and countries around the world, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan in 1985. She had previously been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979: she donated the monetary proceeds of the prize to the poor of India. Following her death on September 5, 1997, Mother Teresa was beatified in 2003 by Pope John Paul II and was canonized in 2016 by Pope Francis. She was declared Co-Patron of the Calcutta Archdiocese in 2017, along with St. Francis Xavier. Her shrine is at the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. To this day, she continues to rank in public polls as one of the most admired women in the world.  Mother Teresa and the Nobel Peace Prize (Albania, 2001) From Wikimedia Commons, in the Public Domain In addition to the stamps of Vatican City shown at the top of this article, many stamps have been issued by countries around the world to honor Saint Teresa of Calcutta, including the United States (Scott 4475, which was issued September 5, 2010, two weeks after her 100th birthday and 13 years to the day after her death). Shown above is the stamp issued by her native Albania to commemorate her receipt of the Nobel Prize. REFERENCES: |
