Our People

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta

By Most Rev. Julian Porteous
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
5/9/2007

Is it ten years since the death of Mother Teresa? It seems such a short time ago that she was in our midst and in our lives. Yet it was the 5th September 1997 that she died. Mother Teresa had been a living saint in our midst. She lived in our part of the world. She visited our county. We watched her. We listened to her words. We knew we were witnessing the life of a saint.

Mother Teresa embodied holiness in a contemporary setting. It was a holiness lived amidst the realities of our time. She showed us how to be holy today.

Her works among the poorest of the poor were wonderful and inspiring, but it was the inner spirit of her works that inspired so many. The way she spoke about her relationship with Jesus. It was her deeply personal and intimate relationship with him that was the driving force to her life, and to her sanctity. She urged us to find him, to discover him. This was the secret to her extraordinary self giving.

She heard in the Lord’s words from the cross, “I thirst”, a revelation of the thirst of Christ for each individual. She came in know in these words how much Christ is personally concerned for each individual. No one is beyond this love of Christ.

Mother showed us how a saint approaches the challenges of our time. She lived through a period of some turbulence in the Church. She knew that many were seeking new ways of doing things in the Church. Voices were challenging the traditional ways. Yet her path, radical as it was in terms of her care for the poor, was grounded firmly and confidently in the traditions, teaching and practices of the Church.

When she saw the dying in the streets of Calcutta she did not press for political or economic change, instead she went to them and provided care so that they would not die abandoned and alone. Her answer to human suffering was not advocating social change, but simply offering love, a profoundly human love empowered by the love of God.

Seeing so many children living in poverty and having little chance to rise above their conditions, she did not argue for population control. She was a great defender of the family. She was an outspoken critic of abortion and euthanasia. She promoted natural family planning. She saw the immense value of every human life.

While she moved daily among the poor and deprived, she saw that First World countries suffered a worse poverty, a personal and spiritual poverty. The greatest human need is not physical but personal, the need for love.

In the emerging situation across the world of what Pope John Paul II called the “culture of death” Mother Teresa became a great witness to and advocate of its opposite, a “culture of life”.

Mother saw that the traditional elements of the Catholic spiritual life were more than sufficient to sustain a dedicated consecrated life and to provide all that is needed to grow in personal holiness: daily Mass, Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the Rosary and time for silent interior prayer.

Her life gave powerful credibility to her words. When she spoke people listened. They heard the ring of truth, at times a challenging truth. People coming from a world so different to her own were drawn to be attentive to what she had to say. Her words touched and converted hearts and inspired lives.

Mother Teresa gave eloquent testimony to the well known words of St Paul that were read today: if my life is without love, it is nothing at all.

She is and remains a saint of our time. Still her example and spirit shine forth.

Dear Mother, pray for us, that we may walk your path of love inspired by Jesus who from the cross cried out, “I thirst”.