 | Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun who won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prizefor her work among the poorest of the world's poor, died Friday in Calcutta,India. She was 87. Mother Teresa was hospitalized several times last year with heart, lung,kidney and other problems, and also suffered ill health in earlier years. Herphysician in Rome, Vincenzo Bilotta, said her heart failed during the eveningat her convent in Calcutta, the Associated Press reported. As her health deteriorated during the past year, Mother Teresa steppedaside and her order, the Missionaries of Charity, chose a new leader, SisterNirmala, in March. |
| Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian born in what is now Macedonia, wasrevered in India, where she lived and worked for 68 years and became acitizen. Although she received the Nobel Peace prize in 1979, she was best known forher work among the poor and destitute of Calcutta. No doubt one day she willbe known as St. Teresa of Calcutta. Mother Teresa, who had been a school administrator in a suburb of Calcutta,began working in the slums of that poverty-ridden and densely populated cityin 1948. She had received what she described as a divine ``call within a call'' twoyears earlier while riding on a train. ``The message was quite clear,'' sherecalled. ``I was to help the poor while living among them. It was an order.'' In 1950 she established the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, becomingits Superior General. She went on to organize diverse and far-flung programsfor the impoverished, eventually reaching more than 90 countries. Her chief task, as she defined it, was to provide ``free service to thepoor and the unwanted, irrespective of caste, creed, nationality or race.''
Through the years, her work expanded. She set up mobile health clinics,centers for the malnourished, rehabilitation hospices for lepers, homes foralcoholics and drug addicts, and shelters for the homeless. Her centers in theUnited States included the Gift of Love Hospice for 15 men with AIDS inManhattan's Greenwich Village. The Nobel Committee said its award to her in 1979 was ``for work undertakenin the struggle to overcome poverty and distress in the world, which alsoconstitute a threat to peace.'' Informed of the honor, she said simply, ``I amunworthy.'' But she came in for criticism, too. A British television documentary in1994 contended that perceptions of her were colored by ``hyperbole andcredulity.'' The number of sisters in her religious order, only 62 in 1957, grewenormously. By the time Mother Teresa won the Nobel Prize, her order hadattracted 1,800 nuns and 120,000 lay workers, running more than 80 centers inIndia and more than 100 others - largely children's homes - in other parts ofthe world. The order's patients included 53,000 lepers. By 1988, her order was operating 600 mobile health clinics where almost 4million people received treatment. That year Mother Teresa visited SouthAfrica, which was still under apartheid rule, to set up a hostel in a blacktownship. By early 1992, experts on Catholic welfare work reported, members ofher order - 4,000 nuns and novices, 400 priests and brothers and hundreds ofthousands of lay volunteers - worked at 450 sites worldwide, including inAlbania and Iraq. Aid and tribute, but no pityMother Teresa often paid tribute to the stricken people she cared for.Speaking to a gathering at the United Nations in 1975, she recalled a womanshe had found dying on a Calcutta street.``I knew she was dying,'' she said softly. ``After I did what I could, shetook my hand, gave me a beautiful smile and thanked me. She gave me more thanI gave her.'' Mother Teresa put particular emphasis on giving the deprived and the sick asensation of dignity through personal contact. ``Ours is a humble service,''she said in an interview in 1975. ``We try to remain right down on theground.'' The healing power of forgiveness was among Mother Teresa's abiding themes.When she visited victims of the chemical-leak disaster in Bhopal in 1984, shesaid, ``Forgiveness offers us a clean heart, and people will be a hundredtimes better after it.'' But she said pity did not help the poor. They ``don't need pity, they needlove and compassion,'' she once said, adding, ``If you don't know them, youdon't love them and don't serve them.'' She said some people used to advise her that her order should have fans insome rooms used by its nuns. ``I do not want them to have fans,'' she continued. ``The poor whom theyare to serve have no fans. Most of the girls come from village homes wherethey had no fans. They should not be more comfortable here than at home.'' In addition to piety, humility and warmth, she displayed strength of will,blunt practicality and organizational talent. The Nobel Committee said itmeant to honor her as much for her managerial skills as for her devotion tothe poor. Mother Teresa earned her Nobel Prize despite a political climate in Indiathat was unfavorable to foreign missionaries. In the 1970s the government tookmeasures to discourage such work, and by the time she won the prize the numberof missionaries in India had shrunk to only a few hundred. It had formerlybeen 6,000. In 1979 there were about 15 million Christians in the country, 2.4percent of the population of 630 million. Church doctrineOn certain social questions, Mother Teresa adhered outspokenly to thedoctrine of her church. She voiced strong opposition to contraception,abortion and divorce.In accepting the Nobel Prize, she declared: ``To me the nations withlegalized abortion are the poorest nations. The greatest destroyer of peacetoday is the crime against the unborn child.'' In 1995, along with Hillary Rodham Clinton, she helped dedicate a shelterin Washington for women and newborn infants. The center was meant todiscourage abortions by providing quarters for children waiting to be adoptedor put in foster homes. In February 1996, Sen. Bob Dole, campaigning in Iowa for the Republicanpresidential nomination, declared that Mother Teresa had called to praise himfor helping pass a ban against partial-birth abortions. In 1995, before a referendum in Ireland was narrowly passed to end aconstitutional ban on divorce and remarriage, opponents of the law wereexasperated when a hand-written letter from Mother Teresa urging a ``no'' votewas made public. On another occasion, she contended in effect that women's place was in thehome, ``allowing men to do what they are better suited to do.'' She also spoke out on other secular issues. She wrote to Gov. Mike Huckabeeof Arkansas, asking him to spare the life of a convicted murderer, WilliamFrank Parker, who had undergone a death-row conversion to Buddhism. Parker wasexecuted by lethal injection on Aug. 9, 1996. Criticism of her came from various quarters. In an interview in 1995 inCalcutta, Debasis Bhattachariya of the Indian Science and RationalistsAssociation declared, ``Mother Teresa is not at all any better than all theother godmen and godwomen, because she helps to place a more kindly mask onthe overall exploitation in our society.'' Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and The Nation , voicedparticularly strong criticism of her in a 1995 book, The Missionary Position:Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso). Hitchens contended that she had``furnished P.R.-type cover for all manner of cultists and shadybusinessmen.'' Her success, he said, ``depends on the exploitation of thesimple and the humble by the cunning and the single-minded.'' The Philadelphia Inquirer's review of the book carried the headline, ``ASalvo of Cheap Shots Fired at a Contemporary Saint.'' The 1994 British television documentary that criticized Mother Teresa,titled Hell's Angel, was also written by Hitchens. Asked about thedocumentary, Mother Teresa said simply, ``Forgive them for they know not whatthey do.''
She was ``an incredible person,'' President Clinton said Friday inEdgartown, Mass., where he was on vacation. The House of Representatives,observed a moment of silence. Answering the callMother Teresa was born Agnes Bojaxhiu on either Aug. 26 or 27, 1910, toAlbanian parents in Skopje, about 200 miles south of Belgrade. Studded withchurches and mosques, the city is today the capital of Macedonia, but was thenruled by Ottoman Turks, before becoming part of Serbia in 1913.Accounts have differed as to the profession of her father. An authorizedbiography of her that came out in Britain in 1992 said he was a buildingcontractor. While a schoolgirl, she belonged to a Catholic lay women's group.At its meetings, letters were read from Balkan Jesuits who had gone asmissionaries to Bengal, in eastern India. At the age of 12 she first felt the desire to become a nun. At 18 shedecided to do so and got in touch with the Sisters of Loreto, an IrishCatholic order with missions in Bengal. She joined the order in Rathfarnham, asuburb of Dublin, in 1928. After English lessons there, she spent a more thana year in Darjeeling, north of Calcutta, where the order ran a girls' school. She then became a teacher, mainly of geography and also of history andcatechism, at St. Mary's High School, on the grounds of the Entally Conventoutside Calcutta. Many of her pupils came from poor families. In time shelearned Bengali and Hindi and became the school's principal. It was while riding on a train on Sept. 10, 1946, that she received her``call within a call,'' she said. She left her school and learned nursingskills from other nuns. Then she began her good works among Calcutta's poor,feeling uncertainties at first but also happiness as she set about meetingpeoples' needs. ``I knew where I belonged,'' she recalled, ``but I did notknow how to get there.'' Before long - in 1950 - she won canonical recognition for her new order,the Missionaries of Charity. The religious sisters who joined took vows ofchastity, obedience, poverty and service. One day in 1952, as her longtime associate Sister Agnes recalled yearslater, ``she found an old woman dying in the streets.'' ``We tried to get someone to take her to a hospital,'' Sister Agnes said,``but before we could, she died. Mother said there should be a place wherepeople can die with dignity and know that they are wanted.'' And so Mother Teresa set about establishing a home for the dying destitute.She persuaded Calcutta's municipal authorities to give her a shabby one-storybuilding, which happened to stand next to a complex of Hindu shrines. In that humble structure, she succeeded in creating a place where those whodied would do so with dignity. The space was cleaned. The dying were cared forwith compassion. The establishment was called Nirmal Hriday, the place for thepure of heart. Expansion of helping homesMother Teresa's undertakings continued, one after another. There was a homefor abandoned children, a leper colony and an old people's home. She went onto set up welfare institutions ranging from a family clinic, to mobile leprosyclinics, to nurseries for abandoned children.Her work brought in donations from admirers. She liked to say that moneywas ``really no problem, we depend on divine providence,'' and she said simplythat her works were underwritten by ``cash and kind.'' She recalled that when her order opened a house in New York, ``TerenceCardinal Cooke was very anxious that he should give every month a maintenancefor the sisters.'' ``I didn't want to hurt him,'' she said, ``but I didn't know how to explainto him that our services are purely for the love of God and that we cannotaccept maintenance. I expressed it the only way I could: `Your Eminence, Idon't think God is going to become bankrupt in New York City!''' One longtime source of support was Catholic Relief Services, the overseasaid agency of the United States bishops, which operates in scores ofcountries. Its backing came largely in donations of United States governmentsurplus food. Reaching the U.S.In 1971 Mother Teresa's order opened its first house in the United States,in Harlem. It was soon moved to the Bronx, where, on a visit to the UnitedStates in 1980, Mother Teresa helped open a soup kitchen and declared herthanks to the poor people of New York ``for allowing themselves to be takencare of'' by her order. In 1981, she opened a mission in Newark.Then in 1982, when she was 72, she worked for a number of days in Beirut,Lebanon, crisscrossing the Green Line that divided Christian East Beirut fromMuslim West Beirut. She rescued dozens of mentally ill children from thedangers of warfare in the Muslim part of the city. One of her biographers, Eileen Egan, reported in a 1985 book, Such aVision of the Street: Mother Teresa - the Spirit and the Work, that a RedCross official who helped her observed later: ``What stunned everyone was herenergy. We didn't expect a saint to be so efficient.''
Over the years, she received many awards and honors, including honorarydegrees from universities ranging from the Catholic University of the SacredHeart in Rome to Harvard. She was awarded the Jewel of India, the country'shighest civilian award. She was an honorary citizen of Assisi, the hill townin central Italy where Francis of Assisi was born in 1182. In addition to all her good works, Mother Teresa found time to composeprayers, including this one: Make us worthy, Lord,But she could also be briskly prosaic. In an interview in 1994 she said:``I work all day. That is the best way." |
