Friends of Mother Teresa Gather in USA

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**“Remembrances of Mother Teresa of Calcutta” was held this weekend (October 5-7, 2007) at St. Vincent College in PA.
Information is available at this Benedictine college website. **stvincent.edu/
 
Mother Teresa’s “Family Reunion”
Posted: 06 Oct 2007 10:22 AM CDT
New Advent Headlines

"She never left the public imagination, nor the private devotions of many, but ten years after her death and three years after her beatification, a resurgence of attention and curiosity has surrounded the figure of Bl Teresa of Calcutta.

This weekend near Pittsburgh, Mother Teresa’s closest collaborators, friends – and even her lone surviving relative, a niece who lives in Italy – have gathered for a conference at St Vincent College in Latrobe, now headed by one of her senior aides, Jim Towey, also a former director of the White House Office for Faith-Based Initiatives.

The Benedictine college’s website features a video of yesterday’s press conference – featuring, among others, her successor as head of the Missionaries of Charity Sr Nirmala Joshi – and Ann Rodgers’ take runs in today’s Post-Gazette:Couples who need help getting pregnant would do well to ask for the intercession of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, according to the priest who is leading the cause for sainthood of the woman known to the world as Mother Teresa.“Even in her lifetime, if she met couples who were having trouble [conceiving], she would give them a miraculous medal and tell them to pray, ‘Mary, mother of Jesus, give us a baby.’ Most often, a year later, they’d come and say, look at our baby,” said the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a member of her Missionaries of Charity and the postulator of her cause for canonization.

She died in 1997 and was beatified in 2003.

He is at St. Vincent College in Latrobe this weekend, along with Mother Teresa’s successor as head of the Missionaries of Charity, Sister Nirmala Joshi, for a conference on her life. It is the first time since her funeral that her closest friends and associates have gathered to share their memories of her, said St. Vincent President Jim Towey, who was Mother Teresa’s legal counsel for many years.

Father Kolodiejchuk, who is seeking a second and final miracle to secure her case for sainthood, believes that she still maintains a special interest in anything having to do with pregnancy and babies. For the Vatican to accept a miracle for sainthood, however, it must involve the inexplicable cure of a medically hopeless case.

The miracle that led to her beatification was the sudden healing of Monica Besra, a Bengali woman who had a stomach tumor that made her appear six months pregnant. She was visiting the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta on the first anniversary of Mother Teresa’s death, when the superior took a medal of Mary that had been touched to Mother Teresa’s body at her funeral, and placed it on Ms. Besra’s swollen abdomen.

"She said, ‘This is your day – your anniversary. You love the poor, so do something for Monica,’ " Father Kolodiejchuk said. “At 1 a.m. she got up and discovered her stomach was flat.”

Father Kolodiejchuk is best known as editor of “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” the bestselling collection of her private letters. In them she frankly admitted that, for the last 50 years of her life, she felt deep pain because she could not sense God’s presence.

People should not be surprised, Father Kolodiejchuk said, because for centuries the church has taught that a journey through the “dark night” is necessary for those on the way to mystical union with Jesus.

“The way that she lived her union was through that darkness. … Her joy and smile required heroic and blind faith, and especially great and heroic love,” he said.

He believes her experience will be an encouragement to many who struggle with the same feelings of abandonment by God. It’s important to understand that her inability to sense God did not mean she lost her faith in God’s existence, he said.

"It seems like she’s even being rejected by Jesus. But at the same time, she is saying, ‘If this is what you want me to do, then I’ll do it for all eternity,’ " he said of her suffering sense of abandonment.

The Missionaries of Charity order that she founded has grown since her death, from 3,842 sisters in 120 countries in 1997 to 4,823 sisters in 134 countries today. Currently there are 257 novices and 425 women in the prenovitiate, Sister Nirmala said. She corrected a reporter who asked her what it was like to follow in Mother Teresa’s footsteps.

“It is walking in the footsteps of Jesus, together with Mother Teresa, as a child of God,” she said.
 
Time Magazine, Friday, Oct. 05, 2007
Mother Teresa and the Kidney Stone
Code: 
	 		By David Van Biema
This week the Catholic News Service reported that the cause for the canonization of Mother Teresa could “cross its last hurdle” if the Vatican validated a cure reported by a priest in Guwahati, India on Sept. 5, the 10th anniversary of the beloved nun’s death. The cure in question, originally reported by the Asian Catholic news agency UCA News, was described as “the disappearance of a half-inch kidney stone in his lower ureter.”
Here is the timetable of the miracle, as provided to UCA News by the Archbishop of Guwahati , Thomas Menamparampil: The priest, Fr. V.M. Thomas, suffered several months with the stone, and had taken medications to no avail. Most kidney stones can be removed surgically, however, in what is often an outpatient procedure. Indeed, Fr. Thomas had scheduled a surgery for September 6 and entered the hospital for prep on the 5th. However, he reportedly asked and received permission to leave the hospital and celebrate a Mass at a children’s home founded by Teresa. At the Mass he asked participants to pray to her on his behalf. When he returned to the hospital x-rays indicated the stone had disappeared. The surgery was cancelled. Notes provided to UCA News by the archbishop included a case summary signed by the surgeon stating, “It indeed seemed like a miracle and unique incident as the stone, which could not be dissolved with medicine, just vanished on the particular day.”
At first glance the elimination of a mineral deposit may seem too insignificant to merit sainthood. Indeed, the criterion of the early Church for sainthood was martyrdom. Even when popes established an alternative requirement of anywhere from two to four posthumous miracles, those have tended to be cures of dire, often life-threatening ailments. They were seldom conditions that the sufferer could have dealt with by other means, but simply didn’t.
It was unclear from the CNS report whether Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, had officially submitted the reported cure for investigation by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. A call and e-mail to a Missionaries official went unanswered.
A certain degree of urgency may have come to attend Teresa’s miracle count. Normally the process of recognizing a saint takes decades or even centuries. But after Mother Teresa’s death, Pope John Paul II waived a traditional five-year waiting period, initiating what some have called a “fast-track” canonization process. The first major step, the establishment of her “heroic virtue,” proceeded quickly. However, verifiable reports of posthumous miracles have apparently been scarce. Teresa was beatified after the first one in 2003. But on Sep. 5 Teresa’s successor, Sister Nirmala, told Agence France Presse that “We are waiting for a second miracle for sainthood to the Mother.” The cure of Fr. Thomas, who had reportedly known Mother Teresa for 18 years before her death, occurred that day.
However minor this second miracle may seem, if validated it will probably prove less problematic than Teresa’s first. In that case, an Indian woman named Monica Besra reported that she had prayed for the Mother’s assistance and been cured of an abdominal tumor. However, members of Besra’s medical staff and her husband maintained that her cure could have been brought about by the conventional medical treatment she was receiving. Besra has subsequently complained to the press that after Teresa’s beatification the Missionaries abandoned her.
To be fair, not every historical miracle was earth-shaking or, for that matter, without controversy. Consider St. Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvao, whom Pope Benedict XVI canonized last December. Galvao, who died in 1822 (he was on the slow track) was a Franciscan monk in Sao Paolo who distributed “pills” that were actually folded bits of rice paper bearing the prayer: “After birth, the Virgin remained intact. Mother of God, intercede on our behalf.” Believers swallowed them for various ailments. After Galvao’s death nuns in his monastery took up the pill production. According to England’s Daily Telegraph, as his cause for sainthood began picking up steam, they were up to 10,000 pills a day. The Telegraph reported that the local hierarchy opposed the practice, and a senior archbishop commented that it “foster suspicion.” However, the Vatican was apparently satisfied.
Galvao’s first posthumous cure was of kidney stones.
 
Conference is just up the road from us. When we went to Mass Friday the parking lot at the Basilica was blocked off and the visitors lot was full.😃
 
This conference was broadcast live this past weekend on EWTN. I learned a lot about her.

The story about her last meeting with Pope JPII was so touching, I cried. What powerful friends we have in heaven!
 
**If anyone knows if and when the programs might be repeated on EWTN or have other information by the speakers, please post it here.
Thanks.
jblair
**
 
jblair said:
**If anyone knows if and when the programs might be repeated on EWTN or have other information by the speakers, please post it here.
Thanks.
jblair
**
Click to expand...
you may have already seen this link, but it tells a bit more about the conference

stvincent.edu/news_stories/news_stories/nearly-1000-convene-for-tribute-to-mother-teresa-of-calcutta-on-10th-anniversary-of-her-death-oct_-5-7

I could not find any rebroadcast info at EWTN
website, but they might be able to give more info if you e-mail them.

I would like to see it again, as I missed part of the broadcast. The part that I did see was so inspiring and informative.
 
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