Today in Rome, the whole Church, and the whole world really, rejoice with gladness at the canonization of
Mother Teresa of Kolkota!
I had the great pleasure and privilege to meet Mother Teresa on two different occasions. Before those meetings, however, I had spent a great part of my upbringing and education learning about her and trying to live out the teachings that she so simply taught to all who paid attention to her.
As a young boy I remember seeing a documentary about her on public television. The show was based on a book called, "Something Beautiful for God." I went to my public library in the suburbs of Chicago and asked the librarian if they had the book. She answered me with, "Something Beautiful for who about who?" and she gave me this funny look. But sure enough, they had the book. The narrative was written by Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist who was a die-hard atheist until he met Mother Teresa who showed him the way of the Lord Jesus. Muggeridge converted and so did his whole family!
I know something special was going on with Mother. She was very close to the Jesuits having grown up in a Jesuit parish in Albania. The Jesuits encouraged her vocation to become a missionary sister, and that is how she ended up in India. After that experience, I read dozens of books about her through the years and she inspired me to become a priest and a Jesuit.
I have always been drawn to her deep love and reverence for Jesus in the Eucharist and how she connected seeing Jesus at Mass with seeing him in every single person that she met, especially the sick, the poor, the unwanted and the unloved. When I was in college she came to Marquette University where I was a student and received the Pere Marquette Discovery Award for her having discovered Jesus in what she called "His distressing disguise in the poor."
Shortly after I was ordained, while living in California, I was invited to concelebrate a Mass for Mother who was visiting her sisters in San Francisco where they worked with AIDS patients. After Mass she gave us all a handful of Miraculous Medals to pass out. A few minutes later she came back to me and took back about half the medals she had given saying, "Thank you Father, good to share" and she passed them out to newly arriving priests. It was a funny moment.
Two years later she came to DC where I was living and she was given the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor. I attended the ceremony at the Capitol, and the next day I concelebrated the Mass that she attended. She met with all the priests afterward and told us funny stories about her life and work as a Missionary of Charity. She was in a wheelchair. It was about six months later that she died on September 5, 1997.
I have been able to help Mother Teresa's sisters in many of the cities I have lived in by saying Mass and hearing the sisters’ confessions and assisting them in their outreach to the poor. Mother was very influenced by Jesuit spiritual directors and the life of St. Ignatius Loyola. She always wanted Jesuits to help her. She considered St. Ignatius one of her special friends and she borrowed his idea of forming a religious order of "Contemplatives in Action." So I will be celebrating today and the days ahead that I have met a saint who now beholds the face of God and trying to live out ever more fully the great example and teaching that she left us. Saint Mother Teresa Pray for Us!
− Fr. Matthew Gamber, SJ, Associate Pastor