When she addressed the president of the United States, the first lady and the other dignitaries at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington in 1994, Mother Teresa of Calcutta described one of her typical experiences: "There was a man we picked up from the drain, half-eaten by worms; and after we brought him to the home, he said only, 'I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die as an angel, loved and cared for.' Then, after we removed all the worms from his body, all he said—with a big smile—was, 'Sister, I am going home to God.' And he died. It was so wonderful to see the greatness of that man, who could speak like that without blaming anybody," the tiny, wrinkled old nun concluded. "Like an angel—this is the greatness of people who are spiritually rich, even when they are materially poor."

On Friday, September 5, after 69 years of helping the dying to die, abandoned babies to live, and the troubled to find God, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, 87, died of a heart attack in her adoptive city. In her last 47 years, she saw her own Missionaries of Charity grow from 12 sisters, working in Calcutta's Home for Dying Destitutes, to an order of some 6,000 nuns in over 500 chapters in 105 countries, aided by four million lay co-workers. During her lifetime, she received the Nobel Peace Prize, the British Order of Merit, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and dozens of other honours. Yet, at the age of 80, when asked what she would do upon retiring as superior of her order, she replied with characteristic brevity, "Clean toilets." In short, she was the most counter-cultural figure of this century. In helping the "poorest of the poor" to die well, she defended the infinite worth of every human life and opposed today's pragmatic "culture of death" more effectively than any other single person.

"Her life was the absolute contradiction of utilitarianism and pragmatism," says Welland, Ont., college professor John Muggeridge, son of the late British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. "Where's the utility in devoting your energies to the dying? Why love them? What good are they? Yet she sacrificed everything, so that they might die well."

It was John Muggeridge's father Malcolm who first brought Mother Teresa to the world's attention in 1969, when he filmed the extraordinarily successful documentary Something Beautiful for God about her work in Calcutta's slums. A decade later, Mr. Muggeridge converted to Catholicism, and five years after that died with the words, "Father, forgive me," on his lips. His son recalls, "Dad originally thought that his interviews with Mother Teresa had flopped because she only answered in monosyllables. But she was so direct and forthright, everyone could see the depth and simplicity of her love. That was always the most obvious thing about her."

She was born Agnes Gonxha ("Rosebud") Bojaxhiu on August 27, 1910, the youngest of three girls, in Skopje, Macedonia. Her father, Kole, was a successful builder, but died suddenly when she was nine. Her mother, Drana, supported the family as a seamstress, yet made time for daily mass, washing and feeding a local alcoholic, and helping a widow with six children. Then their mother died, leaving the girls to raise themselves. At 12, while immersing herself in the stories of Croatian missionaries in India, Agnes began wondering if she had a vocation to the religious life. By 18 she was certain. She travelled to Dublin to join the Loretto Sisters, an order active in India, and there took the name Teresa, after St. Teresa of Lisieux, the 19th-century Carmelite saint of missions and, with Joan of Arc, co-patroness of France. In 1929, Teresa travelled to Darjeeling, India, where she took her first vows. Eight years later, she took her final vows as a nun, and was made headmistress of a middle-class girl's school in Calcutta.

On September 10, 1937—60 years ago—Sister Teresa was riding the train from Calcutta to Darjeeling to take part in a religious retreat. As the train entered a tunnel, she had an experience that would prompt her order ever after to celebrate "Inspiration Day" on that date. "She saw the figure of Christ on the Cross, and heard the words, 'I thirst,'" says Fr. Ambrose Sheehy of Barrie, Ont., who leads retreats for the Missionaries in Mexico. "At that point, she realized that Jesus Christ Himself is reaching out for our love, thirsting for our love, through the suffering of others. That experience was absolutely cent- ral. Later, after her order was founded, Mother would say that she doesn't need social workers—that what she needs are young women who will respond to the cry of Christ from the Cross." In every Missionaries house around the world, there now hangs a large crucifix, with the words "I Thirst" stencilled on the wall beside it.

The religious order did not emerge immediately. In mid-1948, Sister Teresa received permission to leave the Loretto community, provided she continued to keep her vows. She traded her European habit for a cheap white Indian sari, took some nursing training, and then plunged into Calcutta's slums, armed only with a bar of soap, to wash, feed and teach "the poorest of the poor." In March 1949, she received her first helper, the daughter of a rich Indian family; six months later, she had seven. On October 7, 1950, she received papal approval of her order, by which time she had 12 sisters. Two years later, she brow-beat city authorities into donating an abandoned temple of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, for her Home for Dying Destitutes. Since then, more than 40,000 people have been carried there from the streets. Shortly after, she founded the Home for Babies and a leper colony, where all of the order's white-and-blue saris are knit.

After the 1969 airing of Something Beautiful for God, the 1971 publication of Malcolm Muggeridge's book by the same name, and the 1973 Templeton Prize, the Missionaries of Charity began attracting young women from Europe and the Americas. After she was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, her foundations quickly spread. In the mid-1980s, the Missionaries opened some of the first AIDS hospices in San Francisco, New York and Washington. By the late 1980s, they were settled throughout the slums of the world.

The Missionaries arrived in Alberta in 1986, says St. Paul resident Irene McNeely, who first became a Missionaries co-worker in 1974, while living in India. Mother Teresa first visited St. Paul in 1982, to receive the gift of a small house. At that time, however, she sold the house and used the money to build another leper colony—"St. Paul's"—in India. Her nuns returned to Alberta four years later, to work with the Indians on the Frog Lake, Saddle Lake and Goodfish Lake reserves. "There are four sisters here at any one time, but they only stay in any one place for six months, a year, maybe two," says Mrs. McNeely. "There must have been 40 sisters through here in the last 10 years. They get a phone call, and 24 hours later, they've packed up their spare sari and their washbowl, and they're gone. It is a hard life, but they're always so happy."

"Our order came to Vancouver in 1988," says Sister Sharon, a Tennessee-born, 20-year veteran, and superior of the B.C. house. "We have four sisters here, and we run a home for expectant mothers, visit poor families, jails and hospitals, and we teach the catechism." The familiar white-and-blue saris have also been seen engaged in sidewalk counselling in front of the city's abortuaries. "Are we happy? Oh, yes. One hundred percent," she says with a laugh. "But I must get back to work, now."

Mother Teresa's counter-cultural evangelization has reached farther than her immediate followers, however, both because of the heroism of her life, and because of the bluntness with which she spoke her prophetic message. For example, when she addressed the American political elite at the 1994 Washington Prayer Breakfast, she did not amuse the president and his first lady. First, having distributed copies of the prayer of St. Francis, "Lord, let me be an instrument of your peace," she invited the assembled dignitaries to recite it with her. When they merely mumbled, she returned to the beginning of the prayer, and commanded, "Repeat after me: Lord, let me be an instrument of your peace...." And having compelled the powerful to pray, she then proceeded to lecture them on the topic of abortion.

"The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion," she stated, "because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself." Mother Teresa spoke directly to the president and Mrs. Clinton, who sat heads bowed. "If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but rather to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion." No one, not even Hillary Clinton, could escape as she continued inexorably, "Please don't kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted, and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child."

Jim Hughes, president of Campaign Life Coalition in Toronto, says pro-lifers everywhere will miss the withered nun. "Four-and-a-half-feet tall, but steel for a spine," he recalls. "Some people criticized her for not tackling the 'root causes' of poverty, the economics and politics. But she always said that the greatest pain in the world isn't poverty. It's being unwanted. It's loneliness. If you desire to change the world, she'd say, first change your heart and then reach out to those around you."

Not surprisingly, Mother Teresa's evangelistic candour made her some ideological enemies; but most of them remained mute, silenced by the simple sanctity of her life. Most, but not all. Some American gay activists blamed her AIDS hospices for failing to endorse the lifestyle that first infected their patients. Further, a 1994 British TV documentary, Hell's Angel, branded her "a publicity-crazed egotist," and accused her of cruelty toward the dying for uselessly extending their meagre lives with pointless comforts. And in 1996, British-American gadfly Christopher Hitchens published his The Missionary Position, condemning her for promul- gating "a cult based on death and suffering and subjection"—and for her opposition to abortion. As British commentator Robert Winder responded, "It takes some sophistry to blame someone who does so much, for not doing more." Yearly, her houses feed 500,000 families, treat 90,000 lepers, and teach 20,000 street children.

"Some people—mainly liberal Catholics—were angered by her staunch anti-abortion stance," says veteran Ottawa Citizen religion editor Bob Harvey. He covered the 1986 pro-life rally in Ottawa, at which Mother Teresa condemned both abortionists and women seeking abortions as murderers. "But considering the force of her words, there's never been that much criticism of her. For one thing, given her life, it would be almost insane to accuse her of self-interest or gratifying her ego."

If Mother Teresa was "counter-cultural" on public issues like abortion and promiscuity, in the end, she was able to speak freely about them because her life of service itself was the ultimate in counter-cultural statements. And in the end, she was able to lead thousands of her sisters into the religious life, because they saw something in it more real than fashion and the contemporary cult of the Self.

"The poverty of the Missionaries of Charity is real poverty," says Calgarian Marie Lavoie. "They have nothing of their own, but their joy." Mrs. Lavoie's daughter, Suzanne, joined Mother Teresa's nuns as Sister Anthony in 1984. In 1994, she took her final vows, and since then, she has been caring for dying children in Haiti. "Sister Anthony never really changed," says her mother. "As a girl, she was always upbeat, confident, ready to tackle anything." Her father, Doug Lavoie, adds, "She was always fouling out in her basketball games." But then one day, her mother continues, she decided that God was calling her. "Once she joined the sisters, she had 10 years to make up her mind. It's an exhausting life, in the worst slums of California and New York; but there's no doubt that she's happy. When I see all the miserable young people, I think the sisters are the happiest people on earth."

Fr. Sheehy of Barrie, Ont., says the joy of the religious life is paradoxical, but nevertheless far more real than worldly pleasures. "The religious joy lies in sharing the suffering of Christ on the cross," he says. "Mother always said that it came in four stages: first, in silence, so that you can hear Christ; second, in a loving trust that comes from knowing him; third, in total surrender to his will—very scary; and fourth, in joy."

This embrace of the cross is not contempt for human life, he insists. It is self-denial for the sake of life, life in Christ. "It would be impossible to persevere in the Missionaries' work on human strength alone," he says. "No one could live the life they live, do the work they do, and remain so cheerful simply on human will power." So the sustained martyrdom of religious life becomes a powerful witness of Christ's grace, he suggests. The way the Missionaries find Jesus in "the poorest of the poor" becomes the most convincing argument for Jesus.

Professor Tom Langan, founder of the University of Toronto's Christianity and Culture program, thinks that Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity will prove to be part of a historical renewal of the religious life in the church. "Mother Teresa's nuns are the most spectacular example," he says. "But there's also the Sisters of Bethlehem, two new orders out of Lincoln, and dozens more. And none of the new orders are goofy." Historically, periods of upheaval in the church have always seen a recovery led first by the religious or monastic orders; the diocesan clergy and episcopal hierarchy then follow suit, returning to orthodoxy.

"The three vows of chastity, poverty and obedience set a standard which all Christians are required to observe, in different ways," he says. "What the recovery of the religious life proves is that ordinary Christian life is possible, even if the world says otherwise."

Evangelical theologian James Packer of Vancouver's Regent College agrees. "Historical Protestantism was simply wrong in rejecting out of hand the possibility of the chaste, com- munal life," he says. "It simply seems to be a fact that, in the providence of God, some people are called and receive the grace for a very special, very demanding life. Somebody like Mother Teresa reminds us of the adventure of Christian charity, the glory of the enterprise of loving your neighbours exactly as you find them." That adventure requires a commitment to actively sanctify life, he concludes.

The issue now before the Vatican is whether Mother Teresa should be "canonized," or have her name included in the "canon" of the Catholic mass as an example of heroic virtue. Given the open record of her life, few doubt that she will someday be declared a saint. But by the Vatican's own rules, a "cause" for canonization must normally be delayed until five years after a candidates, death; and at least two certifiable miracles, attributable to the intervention of the deceased, must be documented. Still, the Vatican's top theologian, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, has already remarked that Pope John Paul II is free to fast-track Mother Teresa's cause, should he see fit.

Given the whirl of preternatural or perhaps supernatural events surrounding Mother Teresa's life, the Vatican may have few difficulties documenting her post-mortem miracles. New York theologian Fr. Benedict Groeschel tells of walking through the Bronx one day with Mother Teresa and a small party of clerics. Suddenly, like a person possessed, the little nun began rooting about in a garbage dumpster. The New Yorkers all thought that she had gone mad—until suddenly she retrieved a barely-breathing baby from the trash. Her sisters say that their foundress always displayed an uncanny knack for finding abandoned children, living or dead; and when they were dead, she always gave them proper funerals.

—Joe Woodard

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