‘The Poor Must Be Loved’ Her Message Was Forged In A Caldron Of Misery

As soon as her death was known, a wave of tremors seemed to travel through the disaster-prone city of Calcutta, India, where her extraordinary crusade had begun.

Thousands of inhabitants of all ages, rich and poor, of all castes and religions, came rushing to express their grief.

The fact that death caught up with Mother Teresa in Calcutta was her last greeting to the poor of that city who had embarked with her on one of the most remarkable spiritual and human adventures of this century.

I had last seen her legendary figure just a few months before during her early morning mass in the chapel of her convent of Lower Circular Road. It’s a vast room - also used as study room and dormitory by the hundreds of young Indian women of her novitiate - and its only decoration, a crucifix on the wall with the inscription “I THIRST.”

So many times I had enjoyed with my wife the privilege of kneeling on the old, patched jute bags that served as a carpet, next to the woman who drenched the thirst of the poor in India and the universe with the Gospel.

Watching her that last morning, all bended on herself, her lips trembling over an uninterrupted prayer, watching all the dark-skinned young women around her who had come from the four corners of India to wear the white sari of the Missionaries of Charity, I could not help but bless that city of Calcutta which, in her adversity, had bred so many saints.

I have followed many of these saints in the homes for the dying, in the leprosy centers, the orphanages, the asylums of the City of Joy and of almost every city in India, as well as in Beirut, Rome, Paris, Sydney and even in the South Bronx of New York City.

Each time it was to be the witness of the same miracle as if, through a vibration carrying hope, they wanted to announce to all the destitute of the world: “We are here, we love you, fear no longer.”

This was the message of the work of Mother Teresa: to proclaim to humanity “that the poor must be loved, because they have been created by the loving hand of God, to love and be loved.”

She first forged this message in the caldron of misery, injustice and violence of Calcutta, where her vocation as a missionary had sent her. She was the daughter of a prosperous entrepreneur from the city of Skopje, Albania, where she was born 86 years ago on Aug. 26, 1910.

Agnes Bojaxhiu was called very young to religious life. At 18, choosing the name of Teresa because of her devotion to the little flower saint of Lisieux, she joined the Irish religious order of the Sisters of Loretto. On Jan. 6, 1929, she landed from a steamer on the pier of the port of Calcutta, then the biggest metropolis of the British Empire after London.

For 16 years, she taught geography to the daughters of the Bengali bourgeois, in one of the most aristocratic convent schools of the capital of Bengal. Then a train trip to the city of Darjeeling, where she was going for her annual retreat, on Sept. 10, 1946, transformed her peaceful existence.

As the train passed through a tunnel, she suddenly heard a call in her heart.

“It was an order,” she was to say. “I had to abandon the comfort of my convent, give up everything and follow him … to serve him, Him, Jesus Christ, through the poorest of His poor.”

She was 36 then. Seven months later, she received from the Vatican the permission to leave her convent and found a new religious order whose vocation was “to nurse the sick and the dying of the slums, to educate the children of the streets, to take care of the beggars, to give a shelter to the abandoned ones.”

Thus was born, under the impulse of one sole nun, who was soon to be joined by 10 young Bengali novices, the congregation of the Missionaries of Charity, an order that counts today more than 5,000 sisters, 500 consecrated brothers and more than 4 million lay workers. It’s an order with such a vibrant vitality that it cannot accept, for lack of space, all the candidates who apply to join not only the Indian sisters, but also the Japanese, European, Australian and American sisters in some 500 orphanages, leprosy homes and rescue centers scattered over 100 countries on five continents.

The order maintains very tough rules, which novices bind themselves to respect for the whole of their lives. Three are the usual vows - poverty, chastity and obedience; an additional fourth vow is particular to the Missionaries of Charity: “to put oneself entirely and wholeheartedly at the free service of the poor.”

A short rickshaw ride separates the walls of the old Woodlands clinic where she died from the place where Mother Teresa’s crusade began. The cataracts of the monsoon were pouring over Calcutta that summer of 1952. The woman who was still only Sister Teresa was trotting under the deluge when her feet tumbled over the body of a dying old woman. Sister Teresa stopped, closed her eyes, made the sign of the cross and prayed near the woman for a moment.

“Dogs are better treated in this city than human beings,” she reckoned with anger.

The next morning, she rushed to the City Hall. The obstinence of this European nun dressed in a sari raised a lot of curiosity. One of the mayor’s deputies finally received her.

“It is a shame that the inhabitants of this city have to die on its sidewalks,” she declared. “Find me a place where I will be able to receive the dying and help them to appear in front of God with dignity and surrounded with love.”

A few days later the City Council put at her disposal an extravagant construction that had served as a hospice to the Hindu pilgrims who visited the nearby temple dedicated to the goddess Kali, the patroness of Calcutta.

Mother Teresa saw the finger of God in this gift. For it was around this worship area that most of the city’s destitute gathered to die, hoping to be cremated on the funeral pyres of the temple.

The arrival of this Christian woman harboring a crucifix on her sari caused quite a surprise. Soon the orthodox Hindus began to complain. The rumor went out that she and her little sisters were there to convert the dying to Christianity. Incidents broke out.

One day a rain of stones and bricks fell on the ambulance transporting some dying men and women found destitute in the streets.

The sisters were insulted and threatened. Teresa fell on her knees in front of the mob. “Kill me!” she shouted, raising her arms in the sign of crucifixion. “I will go faster to heaven!”

Delegations from the area went to the City Hall and the police headquarters to demand that the foreign nun be evicted. The chief of police promised to satisfy the request, but only after he had conducted a personal investigation. He found Mother Teresa tending to an old man who had just been brought in. He was prostrate, thin as a skeleton, in an unbelievable state of filth, his legs swollen with bleeding ulcers.

“Oh God, how can she bear all this?” the astonished policeman asked himself. Mother Teresa was cleaning meticulously the wounds, nursing them with medicines, speaking softly to the old man, assuring him that he was going to be better, that he need to have no fear, that he was loved. A strange serenity bathed his face.

The chief of police was tremendously moved.

“Do you want me to show you around our hospice?” she asked.

“No, Mother, do not take that trouble. It’s not necessary.”

A group of young fanatics waited for him outside.

“I promised you to evict that foreign woman,” he told them, “and I will keep my promise. But not before your mothers and sisters will come here do the work she does.”

A few days later, Mother Teresa saw a group of people in front of the nearby sanctuary. A man, pale as a corpse, was lying on the ground. He wore around his shoulder the triple sacred string of the brahmins. He was a priest from the temple. No one dared to touch him. He had cholera.

Mother Teresa bent over his face and took him in her arms to bring him inside the hospice. She nursed him day and night. He survived.

Soon he could say: “For 30 years, I have venerated a Kali of stone. It is now a Kali of flesh and blood that I venerate.”

No stone would ever again be thrown against the little sisters with the blue-bordered white saris. The news of the incredible rescue traveled throughout Calcutta.

Ambulances and police vans began to arrive with new loads of the dying destitute.

“Our House of the Pure Heart is the jewel of Calcutta,” Mother Teresa was soon to say. A jewel that the city was to take under its protection.The mayor, journalists, important people came ot visit it. Society women volunteered to work with the sisters.

In 45 years, Mother Teresa would receive in the hospice more than 100,000 dying and starving destitute.

This is where I met her 16 years ago. No other environment could encompass with so much power the charisma and the vocation of this extraordinary woman.

She was cleaning the wounds of a young man so lean and emaciated that he looked like an inmate of a Nazi death camp. His flesh had dissolved. Only his drawn skin remained on his bones. She spoke to him softly in bengali. I will never forget the eyes of this dying man. His suffering gave way to a sort of surprise, then to an air of serenity, the serenity of someone who suddenly felt he was being loved.

Sensing a presence behind her, Mother Teresa turned around. I felt terribly ill at ease for I had interrupted a dialogue which I could sense was unique. The eyes of the dying man seemed to implore the nun to stay with him.

I introduced myself. A European volunteer passed by in the corridor just then. He was holding a wash basin. Mother Teresa called him. She pointed out the dying man to him.

“Love him,” she ordered. “Love him with all your strength.”

She handed over to him her instruments and rolls of gauze, got up and showed me the way to a small space separating the men and women’s wards. There was a table and a bench. On the wall there was a poster bearing a message written in black ink. It said: “Nowadays the most horrible disease is not leprosy or tuberculosis. It is the feeling to be undesirable, rejected, abandoned by all.”

Caring for the dying was only the first step in her crusade. There were also the living and among them were the weakest and the most destitute, the newly born to be found in Calcutta’s garbage cans, in the gutters, at the door of churches.

On Feb. 15, 1953, her new institution, “Sishu Bhavan” - the Children’s House - welcomed its first guest, a premature baby found wrapped in a newspaper on a heap of refuse.

The baby did not weigh even three pounds and was so weak that he could not suck the milk the sisters gave him. He had to be fed with a pipe through his nose.

Mother Teresa fought desperately for his life. She won. So dozens of babies occupied the cradles of the home.

How was she going to be able to feed all the people she now cared for? She refused to worry.

“God will provide,” she said. And God proved she was right.

Affluent citizens sent their drivers and cars loaded with bags of rice, baskets of vegetables and fish. Mother Teresa ordered her sisters to paint posters proclaiming that she would welcome all unwanted children.

During the night, pregnant young women came to offer their yet unborn babies. Although the city of Calcutta was plagued with overpopulation, Mother Teresa did not hesitate to declare war on abortion, a war she relentlessly waged until her last breath, proclaiming everywhere, as in Oslo in front of all the dignitaries gathered to award her the Nobel Prize for Peace, “that we must all have the courage to protect the child to be born, for he is the most beautiful gift of God to a family, to a country, to the whole world.”

After the dying, after the abandoned children, Mother Teresa turned her compassion to the most miserable human beings of all, the lepers. There were thousands in Calcutta.

On a piece of land given by the Indian Railways, Mother Teresa built a shelter with bricks and mud to house the worst cases. She visited them each day, providing food, nursing their wounds, comforting them with words of love.

Soon hundreds of maimed bodies rushed to the gate of this oasis of hope. She invited Calcutta’s inhabitants to join her action through a huge collection of money and food for the victims of the leprosy.

As the emblem for this operation, she chose the antique symbol of the disease: a bell similar to the one that lepers of past centuries had to shake to warn people of their cursed presence. She invented a slogan that was reproduced in newspapers and on billboards throughout the cities, and on posters glued on the doors of automobiles: “Let’s touch a leper with our compassion.”

The result exceeded all expectations. She was soon able to begin construction of a whole city reserved for lepers, “Shanti Nagar” - The City of Peace.

It was an achievement that soon attracted much media curiosity. Malcolm Muggeridge, the widely known British journalist and writer, landed in Calcutta one day to shoot a film for the BBC on this European nun and her little Indian sisters who were practicing charity in a revolutionary manner.The film was shown on several world television networks, and it turned Mother Teresa into an instant international star. Awards, distinctions and prizes began to pour over the indomitable nun. They never altered her humility. She always greeted these honors in the name of the poor of the world.

Graphic: A life devoted to the poor

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: About the author Dominique Lapierre is the international best-selling author whose books include “Is Paris Burning?,” “O Jerusalem,” “Freedom at Midnight,” “The Fifth Horseman,” “The City of Joy” and “Beyond Love.” He is also a philanthropist, supporting a network of humanitarian actions in the slums of Calcutta and rural areas of the Ganges delta with royalties from “The City of Joy” and donations from readers. The network includes schools, homes for orphan and leper children, dispensaries, tuberculosis clinics, family planning clinics and irrigation programs. Donations can be sent to: Action pour les Enfants des Lepreux de Calcutta, 26 Avenue Kleber 75116 Paris FRANCE.

The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Dominique LaPierre Distributed by New York Times Special Features