Celebrating a Sept. 11 Mass to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of Mother (now Saint) Teresa of Calcutta, Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory encouraged the faithful to look to the holy woman as a role model and “continue to fill up what she left undone in serving and loving the poor.”
“While we admire her work and extraordinary example of love, mere admiration is not enough when it comes to saints who inspire our lives,” Cardinal Gregory said. “St. Teresa was a woman of uncanny abilities, and she used all the gifts that God gave her for others. Her example must spur us all on to emulate God’s mercy in caring for those whose lives continue to be at risk.”
Cardinal Gregory was the principal celebrant of the Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Concelebrants included Bishop Robert Harris, bishop emeritus of St. John, New Brunswick; Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, postulator of Mother Terresa’s cause for canonization and director of the newly opened Mother Teresa Institute adjacent to the National Shrine; Msgr. Walter Rossi, rector of the National Shrine; and about 16 priests.
“Many people here present at Mass may have actually met her. We in fact heard her actual voice on television and radio,” Cardinal Gregory said. “Teresa of Calcutta actually walked these streets of the DMV (District, Maryland and Virginia). She brought holiness close to the lives of countless people throughout the world and even here in our community.”
Mother Teresa was born as Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in 1910 in what is present day Albania. As a young woman, she moved to India where she founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950. The order, dedicated to serving the poor and dying and outcast, has homes, convents and hospices throughout the world. She was awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 1979.
“We appreciate and honor her most of all because of her extraordinary witness of caring for and loving God’s poor. It is a witness that both thrills us and should challenge us as well,” Cardinal Gregory said.
In the early 1980s, at the request of then-Archbishop James Hickey, Mother Teresa opened in The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington a convent for contemplative prayer, an outreach to the city’s poor and the Gift of Peace home for persons with AIDS.
Mother Teresa died Sept. 5, 1997 and was canonized by Pope Francis on Sept. 4, 2016. Her feast day is Sept. 5.
“Her life gave personal testimony to the pursuit of those lost sheep … and how God never ceases to reach out to find and retrieve the lost ones in every age and time,” Cardinal Gregory said.
Because the future saint often traveled to the metropolitan Washington area, Cardinal Gregory remarked that “sanctity was a personal visitor to our neighborhoods. Having a saint walk these streets of ours means that the Beatitudes took flesh within our midst.”
“Her closeness was more than something that we should brag about, it was a living challenge for all of us to care for the poor and forgotten,” the cardinal said. “She made it impossible for any one of us to ignore or to be unconcerned about the plight of the neglected,” including immigrants, children, infants in the womb, and people of color who are victims of discrimination and brutality.
He also noted that Mother Teresa “has not been exempted from criticism in our contemporary world that always needs somehow to find fault in even the most generous and loving individuals.”
“St. Teresa herself would be the very first to acknowledge that there was so much more that she could and would have loved to have done to care for God’s poor,” Cardinal Gregory said. “Becoming a saint does not mean that a person has done everything perfectly – just that they did everything that they did do heroically and generously.”
Because the Mass was offered on the 21st anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, prayers were offered for those who lost their lives that day and for first responders. Prayers were also offered for the repose of the late Queen Elizabeth II who died Sept. 8.
Prior to the start of the Mass, Msgr. Rossi noted that Mother Teresa “was a frequent visitor to this National Shrine, most especially in conjunction with the profession (of vows) of her sisters, the Missionaries of Charity.”
About 800 people attended the Mass, including a large contingent of Missionary of Charity sisters; the people the sisters serve in this city; Patrick Kelly, the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, and Peter Kilpatrick, the new president of The Catholic University of America.
Msgr. Rossi noted that “Mother continues to gaze upon us from her place in heaven as well as from the Trinity Dome.” The basilica’s dome features a mosaic of Mother Teresa’s likeness among a host of saints and holy people flanking the Holy Trinity and the Blessed Mother.
After the Mass, the Mother Teresa Institute, located on Harewood Road adjacent to the National Shrine, was officially opened. The institute is a non-profit organization established by the Missionaries of Charity to "preserve, protect, promote, and develop the authentic legacy of St. Teresa of Calcutta to the Church and to the world" and "endeavor to promote greater knowledge of the holiness, teaching and legacy" of the saint.
