Posted on 09/05/2005 7:04:22 AM PDT by Valin
Mother Teresa was born August 27, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, as Gonxhe Bojaxhiu from Albanian parents Nikollë and Drandafille Bojaxhiu.
Her father was a successful and well known contractor, her mother was a housewife.She was the youngest of three children.
Mother Teresa's family was a devoted catholic family, they prayed every evening and went to church almost everyday. It was her family's generosity, care for the poor and the less fortunate that made a great impact on young Mother Teresa's life.
By age 12, she had made up her mind, she realized that her vocation was aiding the poor. She decides to become a nun, travels to Dublin, Ireland, to join the Sisters of Loretto. After about a year in Ireland, she leaves to join the Loretto convent in the northeast Indian city of Darjeeling, where she spent 17 years teaching and being principal of St.Mary's high school in Calcutta.
In 1946, her life changed forever.
While riding a train to the mountain town of Darjeeling to recover from suspected tuberculosis, on the 10th of September she said she received a calling from God "to serve him among the poorest of the poor." Less then a year later she gets permission from to leave her order and moves to Calcutta's slums to set up her first school. "Sister Agnes" who was a former student, becomes Mother Teresa's first follower.
Others soon follow, and papal approval arrives to create a religious order of nuns called the Missionaries of Charity. The foundation is celebrated Oct. 7 1950, the feast of the Holy Rosary. To identify herself with the poor she chooses a plain white sari with a blue border and a simple cross pinned to her left shoulder. Their mission is as she would say hen she accepted the Nobel Peace prize: "to 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."
Yes, little Mother Theresa, so full of good. How quickly the world forgets this type. Instead we focus on Lady Diana's death and her adulterous liasons with other men!
The world is made better by people like Mother Theresa. Her work goes on in India carried out by those nuns who have given selflessly, just like her. God Bless them.
Dan sure had those prorities proberly arranged.
IT always made me sick how that brainless twit Princess Diana got so much attention lavished on her death, and Mother Teresa--who died at the same time--got almost nothing from the vapid global media.
Made me so sick when Elton John's song--Candle in the Wind--was played to commemorate the deaths of BOTH Diana and Mother Teresa. It might apply to Princess Diana--but NEVER Mother Teresa.
"And He has said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness " Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me."
"Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong."
I wonder how long it will take for some loser to post on this board about how much a jerk Mother Teresa was.
I wonder how long it will take for some loser to post on this board about how much a jerk Mother Teresa was.
I believe the President said it best.
"Bring it on!"
Something Beautiful for God (Paperback)
Malcolm Muggeridge
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060660430/ref=ase_interactiveda163-20/104-6311178-1241565?v=glance&s=books
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco; Reprint edition (November 1, 1986)
ISBN: 0060660430
Book Description
No woman alive today has inspired so many with her simplicity of faith and compassion so all-encompassing. As she daily embraces the "least of the least" in her arms, Mother Theresa challenges the whole world to greater acts of service and understanding in the name of love.
First published in 1971, this classic work introduced Mother Theresa to the Western World. As timely now as it was then, Something Beautiful for God interprets her life through the eyes of a modern-day skeptic who became literally transformed within her presence, describing her as "a light which could never be extinguised."
From the Publisher
Illustrated introduction to the life and faith of the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, including transcripts of the author's conversations with Mother Teresa.
I wonder how long it will take for some loser to post on this board about how much a jerk Mother Teresa was.
I believe the President said it best.
"Bring it on!"
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Perhaps you had Christopher Hitchens, vigorous defender of the Iraqi liberation, and his rant against Mother Theresa, in mind? I would much prefer to be closer to sister Theresa when I have to face my Maker than the likes of C H. This essay by C H is a useful reminder of the need to be aware of ones' allies limitations.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2090083/
fighting words
Mommie Dearest
The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 20, 2003, at 1:04 PM PT
I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about the "beatification" of the woman who styled herself "Mother" Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism.
It's the sheer tawdriness that strikes the eye first of all. It used to be that a person could not even be nominated for "beatification," the first step to "sainthood," until five years after his or her death. This was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in the promotion of dubious characters. The pope nominated MT a year after her death in 1997. It also used to be that an apparatus of inquiry was set in train, including the scrutiny of an advocatus diaboli or "devil's advocate," to test any extraordinary claims. The pope has abolished this office and has created more instant saints than all his predecessors combined as far back as the 16th century.
As for the "miracle" that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case, it got.)
According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L'Eco di Bergamo, the Vatican's secretary of state sent a letter to senior cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored making MT a saint right away. The pope's clear intention has been to speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his own lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator or advocate for the "canonization." But the damage, to such integrity as the process possesses, has already been done.
During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not required to affirm that abortion is "the greatest destroyer of peace," as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize*. Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996. Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one …
This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?
The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.
One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.
Correction, Oct. 21, 2003: This piece originally claimed that in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Mother Teresa called abortion and contraception the greatest threats to world peace. In that speech Mother Teresa did call abortion "the greatest destroyer of peace." But she did not much discuss contraception, except to praise "natural" family planning.(Return to corrected sentence.)
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of the book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.
This essay by C H is a useful reminder of the need to be aware of ones' allies limitations.
Something we always need to keep in mind.
I enjoy the fact that CH thinks he is really "sticking it to" Mother Teresea by pointing out that she opened 500 convents. She was a NUN, you dope!!!!!
It is to laugh. :)
Every once in awhile a freeper posts something along these lines to defame Teresa and they are always made to look foolish. I dont think they honestly dislike Teresa so much that they are jealous that someone really can be that good. (not that Mother Teresa was perfect or anything). I guess its just human nature.
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September 5, 2007
Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta
(1910-1997)
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the tiny woman recognized throughout the world for her work among the poorest of the poor, was beatified October 19, 2003. Among those present were hundreds of Missionaries of Charity, the Order she founded in 1950 as a diocesan religious community. Today the congregation also includes contemplative sisters and brothers and an order of priests.
Speaking in a strained, weary voice at the beatification Mass, Pope John Paul II declared her blessed, prompting waves of applause before the 300,000 pilgrims in St. Peter's Square. In his homily, read by an aide for the aging pope, the Holy Father called Mother Teresa “one of the most relevant personalities of our age” and “an icon of the Good Samaritan.” Her life, he said, was “a bold proclamation of the gospel.” Mother Teresa's beatification, just over six years after her death, was part of an expedited process put into effect by Pope John Paul II. Like so many others around the world, he found her love for the Eucharist, for prayer and for the poor a model for all to emulate. Born to Albanian parents in what is now Skopje, Macedonia (then part of the Ottoman Empire), Gonxha (Agnes) Bojaxhiu was the youngest of the three children who survived. For a time, the family lived comfortably, and her father's construction business thrived. But life changed overnight following his unexpected death. During her years in public school Agnes participated in a Catholic sodality and showed a strong interest in the foreign missions. At age 18 she entered the Loreto Sisters of Dublin. It was 1928 when she said goodbye to her mother for the final time and made her way to a new land and a new life. The following year she was sent to the Loreto novitiate in Darjeeling, India. There she chose the name Teresa and prepared for a life of service. She was assigned to a high school for girls in Calcutta, where she taught history and geography to the daughters of the wealthy. But she could not escape the realities around her—the poverty, the suffering, the overwhelming numbers of destitute people. In 1946, while riding a train to Darjeeling to make a retreat, Sister Teresa heard what she later explained as “a call within a call. The message was clear. I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them.” She also heard a call to give up her life with the Sisters of Loreto and, instead, to “follow Christ into the slums to serve him among the poorest of the poor.” After receiving permission to leave Loreto, establish a new religious community and undertake her new work, she took a nursing course for several months. She returned to Calcutta, where she lived in the slums and opened a school for poor children. Dressed in a white sari and sandals (the ordinary dress of an Indian woman) she soon began getting to know her neighbors—especially the poor and sick—and getting to know their needs through visits. The work was exhausting, but she was not alone for long. Volunteers who came to join her in the work, some of them former students, became the core of the Missionaries of Charity. Other helped by donating food, clothing, supplies, the use of buildings. In 1952 the city of Calcutta gave Mother Teresa a former hostel, which became a home for the dying and the destitute. As the Order expanded, services were also offered to orphans, abandoned children, alcoholics, the aging and street people. For the next four decades Mother Teresa worked tirelessly on behalf of the poor. Her love knew no bounds. Nor did her energy, as she crisscrossed the globe pleading for support and inviting others to see the face of Jesus in the poorest of the poor. In 1979 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On September 5, 1997, God called her home. |
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