It doesn’t seem possible that it has been 20 years since the death of St. Mother Teresa.
She died on September 5, 1997. I remember that year well, because Princess Diana died on August 31, just a few days before Mother Teresa.
The two were connected by more than the proximity of their deaths. They had met and Princess Diana had said that Mother Teresa inspired her to help the poor.
One of my favorite books is Blessed Are You: Mother Teresa and the Beatitudes, by Eileen Egan and Kathleen Egan, OSB (1992). When Pope Francis announced that Blessed Teresa would be canonized in 2016, I took the book out again.
Each chapter of the book offers a short meditation on one of the Beatitudes, Blessed Teresa’s own reflections on that Beatitude, and how she and her order – the Missionaries of Charity — lived that Beatitude.
MADISON — “It was a defining moment of my life. God was leading me to care of the dying,” said Tom Moreland, founder and CEO of Saint Jude Hospice, in a recent interview.
Moreland was talking about his work with the Missionaries of Charity at an AIDS Hospice in San Francisco, Calif. He served there for two summers while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Kansas.
If she were alive today, Blessed Mother Teresa would have celebrated her 100th birthday this week. She is someone who will never really die.
She will be remembered for what she said and did while on this earth. But she will especially remain with us in the caring ministry of the Missionaries of Charity she founded and all the orphanages, AIDS hospices, and centers for the disabled and refugees she established throughout the world.
Since June of this past summer, I have been experiencing a very odd phenomenon. Weekly, if not daily, parents of middle and high school students that I work with make a point to stop by my office, send me e-mails, or chat with me at local sporting events.
