Mother Teresa: A Sign of the Church

[Valin]

National Review:

Behold, I tell you a mystery.

Kevin D. Williamson

September 2, 2016

 

On Sunday, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church. This is to some extent pro forma, but the Catholic Church has long been big on forma, for good reasons.

 

There may be much rejoicing in Heaven; on Earth, there will be stupidity.

 

The Catholic Church, and the principal figures in it, have a great talent for inspiring strong opinions, and the strength of those opinions is, generally speaking, converse to the knowledge that the person communicating them has about the Church and its teachings. Ignorant or otherwise, the intensity of global public interest in all things Catholic seems to me significant in and of itself. The people of the world do not gather around their television screens and Twitter feeds when (with apologies to my former church) the Methodists make a change in their institutional leadership. Very few people outside of those who exist in the imagination of Garrison Keillor are much bothered about the Lutheran view of this or that. The Church of England and its ongoing convulsions regarding homosexuality? That is of interest to a handful of oddball American Anglophiles and a couple of million Africans who are probably going to end up Roman Catholics. Pardon me if I sound like an ultramontane chauvinist, but those are the facts.

 

What the world seems to intuit about the Catholic Church — what I intuited about it long before I became a member of it — is that there is something serious going on in it. Something true or something false, but something serious.

 

Set aside, for the moment, the metaphysical claims of the Church — God, Jesus, the Resurrection, the Last Judgment — put all of that in a box and close the box for a moment. Consider only the curious case of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, an obscure Albanian girl of no particular importance or distinction who will figure very prominently in the weekend’s news, and whose face constitutes a kind of worldwide cultural shorthand for goodness of a particular kind, consisting of dedication to the poor, the sick, the friendless, and the abandoned. What moves a young girl from Skopje to Calcutta, from a perfectly comfortable life to complete submersion in misery? Mother Teresa set out to find the ugliest set of circumstances she could and to install herself in the middle, to find the worst place in the world and make that her home.

 

Why did she do that?

 

(Snip)

[SrWoodchuck]

:

Behold, I tell you a mystery.

Kevin D. Williamson

September 2, 2016

 

On Sunday, Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church. This is to some extent pro forma, but the Catholic Church has long been big on forma, for good reasons.

 

There may be much rejoicing in Heaven; on Earth, there will be stupidity.

 

The Catholic Church, and the principal figures in it, have a great talent for inspiring strong opinions, and the strength of those opinions is, generally speaking, converse to the knowledge that the person communicating them has about the Church and its teachings. Ignorant or otherwise, the intensity of global public interest in all things Catholic seems to me significant in and of itself. The people of the world do not gather around their television screens and Twitter feeds when (with apologies to my former church) the Methodists make a change in their institutional leadership. Very few people outside of those who exist in the imagination of Garrison Keillor are much bothered about the Lutheran view of this or that. The Church of England and its ongoing convulsions regarding homosexuality? That is of interest to a handful of oddball American Anglophiles and a couple of million Africans who are probably going to end up Roman Catholics. Pardon me if I sound like an ultramontane chauvinist, but those are the facts.

 

What the world seems to intuit about the Catholic Church — what I intuited about it long before I became a member of it — is that there is something serious going on in it. Something true or something false, but something serious.

 

Set aside, for the moment, the metaphysical claims of the Church — God, Jesus, the Resurrection, the Last Judgment — put all of that in a box and close the box for a moment. Consider only the curious case of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, an obscure Albanian girl of no particular importance or distinction who will figure very prominently in the weekend’s news, and whose face constitutes a kind of worldwide cultural shorthand for goodness of a particular kind, consisting of dedication to the poor, the sick, the friendless, and the abandoned. What moves a young girl from Skopje to Calcutta, from a perfectly comfortable life to complete submersion in misery? Mother Teresa set out to find the ugliest set of circumstances she could and to install herself in the middle, to find the worst place in the world and make that her home.

 

Why did she do that?

 

(Snip)

 

 

Great post, @Valin! If anyone were to follow Mother Teresa's life, they would know that besides her complete devotion to Jesus, she was also known to have great despair that He wouldn't communicate with her in a way she thought was meaningful. Her charity was done without a "pat-on-the-back" or "atta-girl" but solely because she only saw Christ in every person she met. In many ways she was like "The Little Flower" ... Saint Therese of Lisieux...who wrote:

 

"I understood that the Church had a Heart, and that this Heart was burning with love...Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love?" "My mission - to make God loved - will begin after my death," she said. "I will spend my heaven doing good on earth. I will let fall a shower of roses."

[Valin]

@SrWoodchuck

 

[Valin]

Mother T. in Oslo
Jay Nordlinger
September 4, 2016

(Snip)

I often quote Robert Graves, who said (something like), “The thing about Shakespeare is, he really is good.” I discovered, in looking into Mother Teresa’s life, that the thing about her is, she really was good. She had her enemies, heaven knows. She was better than they.

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