He compared their gifts to the tiny bit of yeast that can leaven so much bread because God's mystery and miracle is at work — Jesus in the Eucharist is the "seed of new life for all of humanity."

Francis said his visit to Bulgaria gave him great joy by taking one step further on the path of fraternity and unity by meeting Bulgarian Orthodox Patriarch Neophyte and members of the Holy Synod.

"In fact, our vocation and mission as Christians is to be a sign and instrument of unity, and we can be that with the help of the Holy Spirit, putting what unites us before what divided or still divides us."

He also said the trip gave him a chance to witness the extraordinary tenderness displayed by the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by St Teresa of Kolkata, who was born in North Macedonia.

After returning to Rome, Francis spoke in St. Peter's Square, saying he could feel "the strong spiritual presence of St Mother Teresa" accompany him in North Macedonia.

He said "We see in this small yet strong woman the image of the church in that land and in other peripheries of the world, a small community that, with the grace of Christ, becomes a welcoming home where many can find rest."

He went on to say he was struck by the way the Missionary of Charity sisters saw themselves as sisters and mothers of every person they ministered to.

He said he urged young people of all faiths to dream big and "get in the game" like their compatriot, St Teresa.

He also praised the way the country welcomed and assisted so many migrants and refugees.

"Immigrants create problems for them, but they welcome them and love them, and the problems get resolved. This is a great thing about these people" who deserve applause.

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Vatican News

Although it was never officially announced, the copyright had been granted the same day as Mother Teresa's Sept. 4, 2016 canonization as the culmination of a three year legal process. Continue reading

This does the saints a disservice as it dehumanises them; it does us a disservice as they seem too far removed from our own lives for us to imitate them.

David Scott's The Love That Made Saint Teresa is refreshing for this reason.

He ponders aspects of the life of Mother Teresa of Calcutta (as she is generally known) which are often glossed over, such as the 18 years she spent in the privileged surroundings of the Loreto Convent in Calcutta, during which she barely mentioned the misery beyond the convent gates.

"Her conversion to the poor came slowly," he suggests.

More extraordinary are the details Scott gives which have only come to light since Mother Teresa's death in 1997: her 50-year long dark night of the soul, and her initial visions of Jesus and His Mother in 1947 which led to her new vocation to the poor and the dying.

Although she destroyed her notes and diaries, a small cache of letters written to her spiritual directors during that momentous year reveals that for some time she resisted Jesus' explicit request for "Missionary Sisters of Charity, who would be my fire of love amongst the very poor - the sick, the dying, the little street children."

Jesus told her she was "the most incapable person, weak and sinful, but just because you are that, I want to use you for my glory! Wilt thou refuse?"

Mother Teresa describes how she disputed with this urgent request "and told [Jesus] to find somebody else, that she was frightened of the hardship and the ridicule she would have to endure. She promised to be a good nun if only he would let her stay put in her comfortable convent.

But he kept cajoling her, challenging her with the refrain: ‘Wilt thou refuse to do this for me?'" Continue reading

Sources

• Francis Phillips, writing for the Catholic Herald
• Image: Archdiocese of Brisbane

Built in less than a month, Saimir Strati unveiled the 10-square-meter (12-square-yard) mosaic portrait of Teresa, built with 1.5 million wire staples, at the National Museum of Kosovo in the capital, Pristina. Continue reading

I sought advice from Church figures and journalists, including my wife, Joan Frawley Desmond, who in those days was occasionally writing for the Register. What I heard was that Mother Teresa disliked journalists who portrayed her as a social worker.

It took a few phone calls from mutual Church friends to get the message through that I could do better. Finally, I received a typed letter from Mother Teresa asking me to be at the motherhouse, 54a A.J.C. Bose Road, on Dec. 16, 1988, for the interview. Her letter switched from the administrative to the evangelical in a few words. "Love to pray," she wrote at the end of her note, "feel often during the day the need for prayer and take the trouble to pray so that you do the work entrusted to you for his greater glory. Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God's gift of himself." With that, she signed off.

Kolkata is even more noisy, crowded and chaotic than you might imagine. But it's also an intensely friendly and warm city, once you get past the shock of arrival. I felt a little guilty staying in the comforts of the Oberoi Hotel, which was an oasis behind huge iron gates on Jawaharlal Nehru Road, a virtual river of life streaming through the city. My first stop was to see Father Edward Le Joly, who was an aged Jesuit from Belgium and longtime Kolkata resident. He had worked with the sisters for many years and had served as Mother Teresa's confessor. He lived in a simple residence, with no more than a bed, a desk, a mosquito net and fan — to beat back the city's dripping, relentless heat. Continue reading

• Edward Desmond is a former Asia bureau chief for Time magazine.

He was preaching at a Mass to celebrate the canonisation of St Teresa of Kolkata.

"The world has been inspired by Mother Teresa's work, her energy and commitment to care for the poor."

Dew noted that it is seventy years on 10^th September 1946, that the woman we now know as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was on a train:

"She was going back to her teaching job in Darjeeling, when she heard 'a call within a call'

"She was already a professed Loreto sister, but on that train 70 years ago today she heard God calling her to do something to take care of the poorest of the poor."

Writing about that incident many years later Mother Teresa wrote "The message was quite clear, it was an order - He wanted me to love him in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor."

"She didn't do it to become a saint, it was her response to the call of Jesus to live His Gospel. This meant giving up her life as a Loreto sister and founding the Missionaries of Charity."
Source

• Supplied

Blake started the portrait in 2003, making it out of her bridesmaid's dresses and calico material obtained from Kolkata. She finished the piece in 2009.

Blake has been embroidering since 1996 and is self-taught.

St Teresa is not her first significant piece of artwork.

In 2001 Blake sent an embroidered picture of the Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, to Buckingham Palace for her the Queen Mother's 100th birthday on behalf of New Zealand.

She is now taking the picture of St Teresa of Kolkata around Feilding rest homes and schools.

Wimbledon Villa resident Eileen Gourlay thought the portrait was a special piece of artwork.

"I think she's (Blake) a very clever girl, it's very precious.

"I think Mother Teresa was wonderful and she would be very proud if she saw that."

She said there was one particular quote from Mother Teresa that spoke volumes to her.

"The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. It doesn't matter, do the good."

Before her marriage to husband Peter in 1992, Blake said she had no set religious beliefs.

"If I hadn't become Catholic I probably wouldn't have known who Mother Teresa was.

"She was there for the people. It didn't matter who you were and where you came from," Blake said.

"She lived an unselfish life and that's all I want to do."

Source

• stuff.co.nz
• Image: stuff.co.nz

Mother Teresa of Calcutta - that's what it was called when she lived there but let's call it Kolkata to bring the city's name up to the present - was canonized by the Pope last weekend. The media around the world found their way to the woman "cured" of her tumor, a cure that was the first of the two miracles attributed to her intercession.

Well some do take exception to the miraculous and with good reason. The saint making process entails something offensive to post-Enlightenment ears: miracles. The mere mention of the word evokes goose bumps born of a hostility to clerical claptrap, to anti-scientific superstition or to Protestant fear of a manipulation of the Divine.

For starters, let's clear out some shibboleths.

First, sometimes (as with the recent canonization of the beloved Pope John XXIII who convened Vatican II), the miracle requirement is simply dispensed with. It's not an absolute requirement for canonization. Heroic virtue and faith are. The requirement of miracles is a late development in the process.

When Christianity was confined to the hub of Europe and Orthodoxy to the Middle East, most saints were local products - acclaimed by the locals of a diocese and declared to be saints by the local bishop.

As Christianity spread, the challenge of quality control took over and so, for Western Christians, the declaration of saintliness had to come with papal approval. And that required compliance with a stringent process of investigation of the candidate's life, writings and deeds.

As Catholicism spread beyond its confines, the challenges intensified because local agitators, for whatever reason, advocated less than worthy candidates. So, the process became bureaucratized and we have the current procedures.

Now to the nub of the affront to modern sensibility. The miracle chase smacks of animism, superstition and trickery to a 21st Century mind. The scientific revolution provides a process for the examination, experimentation and treatment of data that leads to a rational and demonstrable conclusion.

When examining a miraculous event, what do the Church's investigators ask?

The simple requirement is that there is no known rational, scientific or medical explanation for the transformation in the patient's condition. It's a negative requirement, not a positive assertion.

And there are enough smart Catholics around - even in the Vatican where this is a ready concession - to acknowledge that today's miracle might well be tomorrow's scientifically explainable commonplace.

I learnt this fact about the approach to miracles because I knew the GP who attended the woman whose cure was the first "miracle" attributed to Australia's first Saint, Mary MacKillop. He was also our family's GP.

His patient was still alive when Mary was canonized some 45 years after the cure. Dr. Jim L'Estrange had referred her to all the best specialists in Sydney and the conclusion had been reached that the patient's cancer was inoperable and incurable.

Good night nurse.

Then when the long investigation of the "cause" (as it's called) for Mary MacKillop was underway, the doctors were all interviewed. All they could say to the main investigator, Fr. Paul Gardiner, was "she was ill and dying, we couldn't do any more and she recovered when the tumors disappeared".

This is no rowdy declaration of the miraculous. It's a modest account of something the best of medical science at the time could not explain. It has never been a "God of the gaps" claim. Simply a humble admission that something has happened that does not have a scientific explanation yet.

But there's a deeper problem that this saint making and "miracle" recognition creates for us moderns. 19th Century scientific positivism creates the expectation that everything has a scientific explanation and only obscurantists will deny that.

Its mirror image is the claim to infallibility made by Pope Pius IX in 1870. That was a joust that amounted to saying "You think your scientific method is infallible. Well I've got an infallibility that has divine warrant!" It was a clash of absolutists trying to out do eachother.

And both sides missed what lovers, poets and sufferers know a lot about: mystery.

• Michael Kelly SJ is a Jesuit priest, journalist and the executive director of UCA News. Published in John Menadue - Pearls and Irritations. Republished with the author's permission.

The home was a lovely house located in a ritzy upper class neighborhood, complete with a white picket fence and a classy front door. I was only 21 and I had only been Catholic for a few months, but I knew enough to wonder how a house like this wound up as a shelter for one of the most austere religious orders in the world.

Soon after I settled in, I found out that the house had been given to the Missionaries of Charity by Princess Diana — or something of the sort. She had worked with Mother Teresa to found the shelter, a pro-life home for pregnant women seeking to adopt their children rather than abort them.

Princess Diana? I remember thinking. Isn't she over in Wales? What would royalty have to do with a tiny, wrinkly, homey nun that owns ten things to her name - at best?

The short of it is that Mother Teresa cherished a profound and touching relationship with Princess Diana. Fascinatingly, Mother Teresa died only six days after Princess Diana had been killed in a car accident in 1997.

Immediately after Diana's death, Mother sent a condolence message that said, "She was very concerned for the poor. She was very anxious to do something for them, and it was beautiful. That is why she was close to me."

Over the years, the two iconic women met with each other from time to time. They once held a meeting at a convent in New York. Mother Teresa left the meeting embracing the hands of Diana, who helped the frail nun down the steps onto the sidewalk.

In February 1992, at a Missionary of Charity convent in a working-class district in Rome, they prayed together. In fact, Princess Diana was buried with a rosary given to her by Mother Teresa. They were, apparently, dear friends, despite the fact that their lifestyles sharply contrasted one another. Continue reading

• Amanda Evinger is the grateful mother of three young children (and two others who have died), whom she homeschools with her husband Michael in a "little house on the prairie" in rural North Dakota.

Then I learned that even saints had massive doubts about God.

How reassuring.

If even the holiest of the holy had second thoughts, why not me?

Maybe we Catholics should talk more about doubt.

It actually is an intrinsic part of the pilgrimage, a Jesuit friend priest told me, common at the beginning and throughout the spiritual journey.

Then he told me to read none other than former Pope Benedict XVI on doubt.

Indeed, the first chapter of Joseph Ratzinger's "Introduction to Christianity" is all about doubt vs. belief.

"The believer is always threatened with an uncertainty that in moments of temptation can suddenly and unexpectedly cast a piercing light on the fragility of the whole," he writes.

Suddenly the believer is not just questioning the literalness of biblical stories — whether, say, Christ really walked on water — but facing "the bottomless abyss of nothingness."

And the abyss is lurking everywhere, it turns out.

Saint Therese of Lisieux, a 19th-century French Carmelite nun, wrote about her own terrible crisis of faith at the end of her life, at a mere 24.

The nuns she lived with were so horrified they edited her writings to remove mentions of the "temptations of atheism."

Spiritual genius Thomas Merton, the famed Catholic monk, said in "New Seeds of Contemplation," "Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt . . . for every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial doubt."

Some of the best-known Catholics novelists of the 20th century — Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Mary Gordon — created characters that swing wildly between faith and doubt.

A recurring theme: Faith is so hard to maintain in a brutal, unjust world; doubt comes easily.

Most famously and recently, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose letters were released in 2007, expressed doubt and despair about God.

Her "dark night" lasted almost 50 years, with rare reprieves, up until her death in 1997. Continue reading

Source

• Margery Eagen in Crux

Margery Eagan is a writer and commentator on current affairs.