Mother Teresa will be formally canonized on Sept. 4 by Pope Francis in Rome. Widely known as “the Saint of Calcutta,” she founded religious orders of women and men that serve the poor in more than 130 countries. Even for a woman who is an icon of modern saintliness, the Roman Catholic Church requires that someone must gather evidence of miracles and present a case that she is worthy to be admitted to the pantheon of saints.
That someone is the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a Canadian priest and member of the Missionaries of Charity Fathers, a religious order founded by Mother Teresa. Soon after she died in 1997 at age 87, he was made the postulator — the main promoter of her case for sainthood. Father Brian, who divides his time between Rome and a Missionaries of Charity house in Tijuana, Mexico, is also the editor of a new book, “A Call to Mercy: Hearts to Love, Hands to Serve,” drawn from Mother Teresa’s teachings and testimony about her life. He was interviewed in August before leaving for Rome to prepare for the canonization ceremonies. This interview has been edited and condensed.
How did you meet Mother Teresa?
My sister — we’re only two of us — joined the Missionaries of Charity Sisters in 1976, and a year later my parents and I came from Winnipeg to see her in Rome. During a Mass with the first group of contemplative brothers, Mother Teresa pinned a cross on a priest and six laymen. The male branches of the M.C.’s wear a cross over the heart, and the sisters wear a cross on the shoulder, which serves the purpose of holding the sari together. After the Mass, as we were saying goodbye, Mother Teresa said to me, “Oh, I would like to pin a cross on you, too.” I was only 21, and this was Mother Teresa talking, and I was just so shocked, I didn’t say anything. The next morning after Mass, in the convent of San Gregorio, I was brave enough to go up to Mother and ask her, what did she mean. She invited me to join the brothers. So I did.
There are usually two miracles required to establish sainthood — one for beatification and another for canonization. How do you go about finding the two miracles?
It’s more like waiting and hoping for people to report something. The first one, the miracle for the beatification, was Monica Besra in Bengal, in India. Monica had a tumefaction, like a tumor, in her abdomen, and it was 16 or 17 centimeters — roughly the size of a woman six months pregnant. Her family had tried different things, and nothing was working. They took her to the sisters, who took her to the doctor, who sent her home on the 31st of August of 1998. Pretty much, she was dying. On Sept. 5, the first anniversary of Mother Teresa’s death, the sister superior took a medal of Mary that had been touched directly to the body of Mother Teresa at the time of the funeral, placed it on Monica’s stomach and made a very simple prayer: “Mother, today’s your day. You love the poor. Do something for Monica.” That was about 5 p.m. on Saturday. At 1 a.m. when Monica got up in the middle of the night to go to the washroom, she discovered that her stomach was flat. Sunday morning, the sisters saw her up and sweeping with a broom, and they said, whoa, what is up with Monica?
But what proof is there that this was really a miracle, and that there was no medical or scientific explanation?
They’re quite strict on these things. In Brazil, a postulator I knew on another sainthood cause received the news that the miracle case he had put forth was rejected, so it’s not automatic. In the India case for Mother Teresa, there were 11 doctors consulted, and only one was Catholic. The rest were Hindu. You don’t ask the doctors whether they think it’s a miracle. You only ask them, “Can you explain this medically?”
Why were there 10 years between the first miracle and the second miracle?
There were other cases, but when we had the documentation, I would ask the doctors I knew at Scripps [Scripps Clinic Torrey Pines in La Jolla, Calif.] or in Tijuana, and usually the doctor would say, “It could happen naturally.” I had another case, everything looked like it was checking out fine, except the mother-in-law wrote me a letter and said the whole year she was praying to Padre Pio. And that was the end of that. Whose miracle was that, Mother Teresa or Padre Pio?
The second miracle finally happened in Brazil, and this time it was a man, Marcilio. He had a bacterial infection in the brain which had caused multiple abscesses … and he developed hydrocephaly. His wife started praying a novena, nine days of prayer, to Mother Teresa, and she asked her family members to do the same. On Dec. 9, at 2 in the morning, Marcilio had excruciating pain in the head, and went into a coma. He was just near death. The doctor finally gets him in the operating room, hoping to drain the water, but couldn’t do it the way he had planned, so he left the operating room at about 6:10 p.m. to find a doctor who could do it another way. When he returned to the operating room — unsuccessful in his attempt — he discovers that Marcilio is awake, in no pain, and he says, “What am I doing here?” Two brain scans were taken, one on Dec. 9 and one on Dec. 13, and all the different surgeons look at the two scans, and they say you can’t go from here to there. The doctor even told Marcilio’s brother that he had 30 patients with hydrocephaly like this and 29 died. Only Marcilio survived.
Mother Teresa has her critics. They have accused her of running facilities that offered substandard care, and of cozying up to dictators like Enver Hoxha in Albania and Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti. Did the sainthood process examine these allegations?
Oh, yes. In fact, Christopher Hitchens was called as a witness, in Washington. When we were preparing the actual case, myself and the people helping watched his movie “Hell’s Angel” and read his book “Missionary Position.” We have to take them seriously. But some of it is just mistaken information. Mother never took any money from Duvalier. And in the movie, Hitchens presented Mother going to the tomb of Enver Hoxha, the dictator. What was she doing there? The facts are that she had asked to see the tomb of her mother and sister, and government escorts took her without telling her to Hoxha’s tomb. Then she says, now can I go to the tomb of my mother and sister? The Albanian translator, who also gave her testimony, said, “We in Albania know that any foreign visitor was taken to the tomb of Enver Hoxha.” That was part of the protocol.
In India, there is some resentment that Mother Teresa made Calcutta synonymous with poverty.
It’s not like Mother tried to focus on the poverty of Calcutta. That’s just where she started. Interesting that after India, the country that has the next largest number of houses run by the Missionaries of Charity is the U.S. She kept saying that the greatest poverty in the world today is to be unloved, unwanted and uncared for, and that’s a harder and more difficult poverty to reach.
Mother Teresa’s private letters and writings, which were published in a book that you edited in 2007 on the 10th anniversary of her death, revealed that she suffered for decades from an excruciating anxiety that God had abandoned her. Is that kind of spiritual suffering a prerequisite for sainthood, or an obstacle?
In the Positio — that’s the Latin for the written case examining how Mother Teresa lived her Christian life — we had a special chapter on the darkness because it was a very distinctive feature. We had to examine it in light of the mystical tradition. It wasn’t surprising that she had it because other saints have had it. What was really more surprising is that it was so long, almost 50 years. To live like that is heroic. An immature person would have been crushed by such an experience. She was suffering that loneliness, that sense of being unloved, unwanted in her relationship with Jesus, but in solidarity with and identified with others who were in some way living that sense of loneliness and being unloved.
It must be satisfying for you to see her declared a saint.
It’s been 17 years, since 1999. That will be nice to be standing there on Sunday morning. The canonization rite itself is before Mass begins. The prefect in charge of the Congregation for Saints does the official requesting, and I’m standing next to him. Thankfully, I don’t have to open my mouth.
(The New York Times)