Mother Teresa's Christmas

Christmas in Calcutta

Mother Teresa is the personality of the moment. She died just five years ago and is already ready to be beatified. The canonical process is finished, the miracle requested has already been approved, and the solemn ceremony of her beatification has already been scheduled for Spring.

This is an event in the history of the Church. In fact, to find another example of a case for beatification being completed so quickly, we need to go back to the Middle Ages when saints were declared by public acclaim. The norms which preside over these processes decree that the cause for beatification cannot begin in the first five years following the candidate's death. The Pope wanted to make an exception for Mother Teresa however. The process began a year after Mother Teresa's death and has taken just four years. This is because, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said immediately after the nun's death, 'her sanctity is evident and universally proclaimed.'

'I have spent many Christmases with Mother Teresa,' Monsignor Hnilica told me. 'But I remember one in particular. I was in Calcutta, India. Mother Teresa invited me to dinner on 24 December, Christmas Eve, to celebrate with her and the other nuns. It was a meagre meal as is usual for the Missionaries of Charity, but rich in joy, affection and fraternity. The atmosphere was so cordial that we almost forgot to eat.

'At a certain point, I heard a knocking on the door. One of the nuns went to see who it was and returned with a basket covered in cloth. 'A woman gave it to me and then rushed off,' she said. As she gave the basket to Mother Teresa she added, 'She was probably a benefactor who wanted to donate some food to us for Christmas.' Mother Teresa removed the cloth and her eyes lit up. 'Jesus has arrived' she said with a beautiful smile. The other nuns ran to see. In the basket there was a sleeping baby boy. He was an abandoned baby who was a few days old; the woman who had brought him, perhaps his mother, was unable to look after him and so entrusted him to the nuns; a frequent occurrence in Calcutta. The nuns squealed with joy and held onto the basket, moved by the sight of the sleeping baby. Their cries woke him up, and he began to cry. Mother Teresa picked him up, smiled and yet at the same time had tears in her eyes. 'Look, now we can say that our Christmas is complete,' she said. 'Baby Jesus has come to us. We must thank God for this wonderful gift.' A powerful emotion emanated from her, a protective force which was her great love.'

Christmas in Kosovo

The future Mother Teresa was born in Skopje, in Kosovo, in a well-to-do family. Her father had an important building company. She was baptised Agnes, but because she was so pretty, the family nicknamed her 'Gonxha' which means flower bud. She had one elder sister Agatha and one elder brother, Lazar. It was their mother, Drone (the Albanian equivalent of Rose) who instilled in them the importance of transmitting Christian love and helping those less fortunate in life.

'Each week, our mother took us to visit the city's poorest families bringing with us food and clothes,' Lazar, Mother Teresa's brother told me. 'My sister Agatha and I were never very enthusiastic about these visits, while Agnes always went very willingly. I remember there was a poor widow who lived with her seven small children in a dark and dirty room. It used to break my heart when we went to visit this woman with our mother. They would all be piled up on a big straw bed under a dirty, greasy blanket. They all lived in that one room with a tiny space for cooking and no bathroom, whereas each of us had a lovely bedroom to ourselves and a bathroom with running water, a rarity in Skopje at the time.'

'While Agatha and I tried to ensure the visits were as brief as possible, Agnes was always very willing to help the dirty and malnourished children. On feast days and especially at Christmas, we hardly ever saw her as she was always with these children, to the extent that even our mother complained. She wanted Christmas to be a family occasion, all together at home. But it was impossible for Agnes to resist staying away from this poor family.'

Becoming a nun

As a young woman, Agnes knew several Jesuit missionaries who carried out their apostolate in India, in Bengal state, and she began to correspond with them. The religious used to send letters about what they were doing to save the abandoned children. It was these accounts which moved Agnes the most. She began saving money to send to these missionaries so that they could help more abandoned children. She also began thinking about going to India to dedicate her life to these children.

She didn't, however, want to become a nun. She wasn't attracted to the cloistered life. In those days, 'lay missionaries' didn't exist and she realised that only by entering into a religious order could she fulfil her dream. She thus agreed to become to a nun. At the age of seventeen she joined the 'Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto' because they had a mission in Bengal, and she departed for India.

She thought she would then be able to set up an initiative to help abandoned children, as she had always dreamed of doing; instead her superiors sent her instead to the College of Calcutta to teach the daughters of the city's wealthy families. Sister Teresa was upset, but she remembered the vow of obedience, and she submitted to the authority of her superiors.

She remained in this beautiful college for 18 years. Her Christmases in this period were in the traditional style of the wealthy: the crib was made, presents were exchanged, Christmas cards were written, Midnight Mass was celebrated with solemn hymns and carols and a succulent lunch was eaten on Christmas day. She still managed to find a way to remember the abandoned children for whom she became a nun. In the college, an association called the Female Confraternity of the Blessed Virgin was created. The girls who belonged to it visited poor families once a week. For Christmas, Mother Teresa prepared small gifts, and through the girls' help, ensured that they were distributed to the poorest children. Only in this way did she feel she was celebrating fittingly the birth of Jesus Christ. Then a change occurred.

Poverty in Calcutta

On the evening of 10 September 1946, Mother Teresa departed for a few days' rest in the mountains, at the foothills of the Himalayas. She arrived at the train station at about 8 p.m. to catch the night train and avoid the suffocating heat of the season. There she discovered Calcutta's poverty.

She had lived in the city for a long time and she knew that it was considered the poorest capital in the world. Nowhere else was it possible to find so many poor people. At times, she used to leave the college and find herself in a teaming mass of starving and dying people, yet that night it appeared somehow different. It was as if she saw reality for the first time. While travelling to the station and waiting for her train, she looked around worriedly as if she were lost. In the old and decrepit station, there were numerous outcasts, reduced to walking skeletons through hunger and marked by disgusting diseases: young mothers breast feeding their children were begging; groups of children dressed in rags followed foreigners asking for food; cripples and the blind were seated on the floor using their mouths to plead for some food to appease their hunger pains.

The train arrived full of passengers and increased its load with even more. When it set off, it moved slowly to prevent the various people on the carriage steps and on the roof from falling off. The train stopped at every station and each time Sister Teresa was presented with the same terrible vision of an enormous crowd of begging skeletons. The nun continued to look around appalled and bewildered. She had never before felt so much pity or remorse in her life.

She thought and she reflected. She tried to find an explanation for all of this pain and human desolation. Her faith told her that these human larvae which travelled with her or rested in the stations, were God's children, in the same way as she and her pupils at the college were. The difference being that she and her pupils had had the good fortune to have a well-to-do existence, while these 'Children of God' suffered enormously, were deprived of everything, and their existence was worse than that of animals.

She looked at the young mothers who held their children to their breasts with infinite tenderness. Their breasts were flabby, empty and sagging, they had no milk to give. Yet their feelings were not less noble than those of rich women with firm breasts. The pain they felt at seeing their children go hungry was no less than the pain of an English or American mother who sees her child suffering.

Meeting Mother Teresa

'It was that exact night,' Mother Teresa told me one day while recounting her life 'that I opened my eyes to human suffering and deeply understood the essence of my vocation. In fact, I can say that that night I received a new calling from God. A calling within the calling. The Lord invited me not to 'change my status' as a nun, but to 'modify' it making it more in keeping with the Gospel and the missionary spirit he had given me. It was an invitation to improve the vocation that I have had since a young girl. I felt that the Lord was calling me to give up my peaceful life within the religious Congregation and to go out on the streets in order to serve the poor. It was a clear and precise message: I had to leave the convent and live with the poor.

'Jesus was calling me to serve the most needy and the poorest of the poor in Calcutta: those who don't have anyone or anything; those who everybody avoids approaching because they are contagious and dirty, full of germs and parasites; those who are unable to go begging as they are naked and do not even have a single scrap of clothing to put on; those who no longer eat because they are so weak from starvation that they donÕt even have the strength to chew their food; those who collapse on the streets, exhausted and worn-out, aware that they are about to die; those who have stopped crying as they have no more tears left.'

I asked Mother Teresa if her new mission began straight away. 'No,' she replied, 'I had to wait two more years. Two years in which I had to explain to my superiors the new vocation I had received. I had to convince them that I was serious and that it wasn't just a whim. I then had to ask the Pope for permission to leave the Congregation in which I had lived 18 years, and begin a new life while remaining a nun. It was a difficult and painful process, but the Lord had called me and He saw to it that everything was sorted out.'

'Eventually in the summer of 1948, I obtained Pope Pius XII's permission, I left the convent and did a nursing course so that I could help the poor better. I wanted to begin my new mission on Christmas day 1948, because Christmas represents the essence of our faith, the assuming of a human nature by God.'

'On the morning of that 25 December 1948, having attended Mass, I went to visit the only slum I knew, the one in Motijhil, an area near the college where I had taught for many years. I used to send my pupils to that slum with the Christmas gifts I used to prepare for the poor children that I didn't know. At last I could meet these children face to face. I could celebrate Christmas together with Jesus who lives in the poor.

'I remained in Motijhil for the whole day, socialising with the mothers and playing with the children. I was so happy that I forgot I had nowhere to sleep. Thus, that night, I began looking for a place to stay and I felt as if I were re-living the tale of the pregnant Virgin who was unable to find a hotel and ended up in a stable where she gave birth to Jesus. In the middle of the night, I succeeded in finding a woman who allowed me to stay in a miserable hut for five rupees a month. The next day, in that hut, I began teaching five children: my first children. In the hut there was no table, no chairs nor a blackboard. I traced out the letters of the alphabet on the ground with a stick and that was how I taught. Three days later, those five children became twenty-five, and at the end of the month there were forty-one. I later constructed a school for 500 children on that very spot. From then on,'concluded Mother Teresa, 'every year I celebrate the beginning of my work at Christmas time.'