The Healing Journey

September 5, 2024

‘You are the most incapable person…’

No one understood death and grief like Mother Teresa, who worked with the sick and dying in Calcutta. She once said, “I begin each day with holy Mass, receiving Jesus hidden under the appearance of a simple piece of bread. Then, I go out into the streets and I find the same Jesus hidden in the dying destitute, the AIDS patients, the lepers, the abandoned children, the hungry, and the homeless. It’s the same Jesus.”

Mother Teresa never wrote a theological treatise or held a position of power. She never sought acclaim or approval. And yet there was no greater embodiment of God’s mercy in the modern world. St. Teresa of Calcutta has been called the “Saint of Mercy,” and on September 5, we observe her feast day.

In 1946, on a train to Darjeeling, she had a mystical encounter with Christ.

“[It] was a call within my vocation. It was a second calling,” she wrote, according to the postulator for her cause, Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. “It was a vocation to give up even Loreto, where I was happy, and to go out in the streets to serve the poorest of the poor….I knew it was his will and that I had to follow him.”

In a letter to Archbishop of Calcutta, Ferdinand Perier, S.J., she said that when Jesus asked her to found the Missionaries of Charities, he told her, “You are, I know, the most incapable person, weak and sinful, but just because you are that, I want to use you for my glory.”

Since it began in 1950, her religious order has gone from a few nuns in the slums of Calcutta to 5,500 worldwide, who minister to the sick and dying, the poor, orphans, the homeless, and those with AIDS in 758 houses in 139 countries, with plans to enter China.

Pope Francis, who canonized her on September 4, 2016, said, “Mother Teresa, in all aspects of her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, making herself available for everyone through her welcome and defense of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded.”

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