Pope Francis' somewhat ambiguous Latin had just declared Mother Teresa a saint in the Catholic Church. I glanced back at Fr. Pascual, my good friend who had been a good friend of hers, but I couldn't tell whether his face was streaming rivulets of tears or rivulets of sweat. "Both" he told me later, as we both bit into pieces of steaming pizza with the homeless and their beloved sisters.

Pope Francis had obligingly thrown a party in his audience hall for Rome's street people following the canonization. The sisters and some select priests had been invited, but Fr. Pascual and I had not been issued passes. At first a severe Italian guard threw me out as I tried to sneak in claiming to be "his friend," pointing to a homeless Romanian who had befriended me. That brief rejection by the authorities smarted, and I felt what the homeless feel every day as I saw everyone else happily entering the dinner. But soon enough my Roman collar got me past the guards and I was enjoying free pizza with the rest of Rome's poor. I'm writing this in one of Rome's cozy Irish pubs, with a guiness and bag of "crisps" in front of me, having paid my six euros to enjoy a place at the table. The poor had their pizza today, but no doubt are back in the streets tonight.

But back to the canonization Mass. We were like so many lobsters, baking in our juices under a relentless sun. Many of us braided bandanas or handkerchiefs around our heads, which provided amusement to those behind us but kept sunstroke at bay. Thanks to the Vatican police, we had plenty of bottled water as the Mass began. And what did our Pope say about our beloved Mother, beyond canonizing her? He spoke of mercy, of course, the kind of mercy Mother Teresa showed simply by smiling through her extreme darkness. "Thoughtfulness," she said, "is the beginning of great sanctity." To give a nobody a thought, a smile, even though you yourself feel completely empty, is the beginning and perhaps the summation of great sanctity. But where did she get the courage to smile and to serve the other person when she faced such deep inner darkness?

​She had made this decision: I will not go against a king with 20,000 troops if I only have 10,000 (as Jesus counseled in today's gospel). I will be smart: I will only go against the armies of the world, the flesh and the devil by totally surrendering all that I have and am to the Lord of Hosts. I can never, of myself, have enough firepower to overcome my enemies. Only by surrendering everything to my Lord can I expect to overcome my own painful darkness. "So I tell you," Jesus said at Mother Teresa's canonization Mass, "that anyone who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple." She had the courage to do that, and so she won the war. Why were Fr. Pascual and I streaming tears as well as sweat this morning as Pope Francis recognized this heroic virtue? Because we know it to be true, a severely beautiful truth, that is not beyond the grasp of either of us, or any other in that packed St. Peter's Square this morning. "Holiness is the privilege of a few, but the simple duty of you and me," Mother would say. Not only the duty, but the privilege, one day, to join her with God in complete loving trust, which is heaven itself.

You know that disturbing voice a little child uses to say “no” to his mother? The Asian couple next to me in this plane have the cutest little china-doll baby. The plane begins to shudder with turbulence, the seat belt light pops on, and Mamma pulls her darling onto her lap. The little girl protests with charming decisiveness—charming because she is absolutely helpless but pronounces her “no” with such queenly finality. She has barely begun to speak but this word “no” she knows. Listening to this litany of “no’s” to a loving mother who only wants to keep her from banging her pretty little head, I hear the disturbing story of the human race. Who has taught us to say such an assertive no?  It is Satan’s voice I am hearing from this pretty little baby.

It is my voice. All my life I’ve been saying no to God. Granted, I’ve said yes a few times, but usually only after a bloody fight. My first impulse is distrust. Prove to me it will be better your way. Why do I imagine I know better than Him who brings order to earth and skies? It is the height of illogic to refuse God, and yet my default response to Him is something like what will you give me if I do it your way?

We’ve just finished a priests’ retreat on Our Lady in Fatima, inspired by the spirituality of Mother Teresa. Most of us have been disciples of Mother for decades, although some have only recently discovered her particular spiritual perceptions. She made an extraordinary vow in 1942, four years before Jesus would ask her to leave the Loretto Sisters for the open streets of Calcutta: “I will refuse you nothing, under pain of mortal sin.” She trusted Him that much, to surrender even the smallest details of her life. And the next 55 years were not easy. She fought sometimes tooth and nail to hold onto the joy of loving Jesus, but by God’s grace she prevailed. Certainly we all have fears, attractions and impulses that conflict with God’s will. A bit of food, a sharp voice, the memory of a pretty girl, an ache or pain—every bit of the world is at war with God. Every single thing He has created—all of it good—has been compromised by a fundamental disorder. It was not easy for Mother Teresa to deny Him nothing, and to accept everything, but she did it, by His grace. “If you only knew how He thirsts for you,” she wrote her sisters in 1993.

If only that baby would stop saying no for just a minute and consider: my mother loves me more than herself. Why won’t I let her hold me close to her heart? Yes, the plane is shuddering all around me, but do I know of a better place to be than in her arms? If only I would let Him hold me close to His heart.

Yesterday I returned from Tanzania and a climb up Mount Kilimanjaro, and later this week will post a description of this adventure. Today the Church gives us Corpus Christi Sunday, and so I post the homily I gave to the Missionaries of Charity here in Nairobi. Many of the disabled men from the sisters’ home came to Mass, and their genuine smiles and authentic devotion shone through otherwise crippling physical and mental disabilities. Of such children is the Kingdom of God.

A Public Holiday

The Church celebrates the Feast of Corpus Christi as a “public” holy day. Obviously not everyone celebrates it, but Corpus Christi is “public” because Jesus gives his flesh not only for Catholics but “for the life of the world.” Manna, the Old Testament symbol of the Eucharist, was given only to the Jewish people. Christ gives His body, however, to the whole world, and we receive it on behalf of the entire human race. If only “the public” would eat this bread, we would have peace on earth and endless life in heaven! Mother Teresa often said that Jesus is the bread to be broken, and we become that bread when we receive him. As His broken body heals the brokenness of humanity, so our brokenness, in Christ, heals “the public.” That is your essential vocation as Missionaries of Charity: not just to give bread to the poor, but to be bread for the poor.

Justin the Atheist

St. John Paul wrote that, by bearing the Eucharist in procession through city streets, “the Church proclaims that the sacrifice of Christ is for the whole world.” When John Paul offered public Mass for a million people in Warsaw in 1979, and when he offered the Body of Christ to five million in Manila’s city square in 1995, and when he gave the Body of Christ to 12 million in Mexico City in 2002, he did so not just for those Catholics present, but for the entire world. And the entire world received blessing from that Mass in Warsaw, which ultimately led to the overthrow of communist regimes in all of Eastern Europe.

Last week I hiked for a week with a young man from Colorado named Justin. Educated in American public schools, which exclude any mention of God, he said he didn’t believe in God or in anything he couldn’t see. Three times the Holy Spirit gave me the right moment to speak to him about God’s love without awkwardness, and each time Justin expressed polite non-responsiveness. He could see how many Tanzanian porters attended morning Mass on the trail, but he could also see that no European or Americans paid the least attention to the things of God on our journey. Justin and other wealthy unbelievers are that public for whom this feast of Corpus Christi is also offered. Justin is dying from hunger but doesn’t know it; who will receive the bread of life for him?

Sacrifices made all for thee

Mother begged you sisters to offer your afflictions for the love of Jesus and the poor. “Our chalices,” she wrote, “will be filled with sacrifices made all for thee.” In the First reading, Moses explains that God allowed the Israelites to suffer hunger, and then fed them with manna in order to convince them that man does not live by bread alone. It was the Lord who guided them through that “vast and terrible desert” with its serpents and scorpions, its parched and waterless ground, bringing forth water from the rock and manna from the sky. Thus Moses explains why God allows suffering? Only through the humility of deprivation do we learn to trust Him, and learn to love Him. The public is dying of hunger for love, for meaning, for God, but it is so drugged on cheap substitutes that it doesn’t know it. My friend Justin, for example, desperately seeks to convince himself that he is happy, or as happy as one can be in a sad and meaningless world. God will allow Justin to suffer in the hope that he will learn to love and trust Him. Let us trust the divine physician’s treatment for our spiritual sickness when we suffer or see pain in others.

Corpus Christi priests

In 1981, Fr. Joseph Langford and some other priests wanted to work more closely with Mother for the poorest of the poor. They wanted a share in the secret fire that radiated from this little Albanian nun. At first this little group called itself the “Priestly coworkers of Mother Teresa.” But Mother soon changed the name to the “Corpus Christi Movement of Priests.” Why did Mother choose the name of Corpus Christi? I think it was because she wanted to remind priests of their essential purpose: to bring the Eucharist from heaven to earth “for the life of the world.” Mother also knew the essential purpose of your Society is to touch the Body of Christ, first in the Holy Mass and then in the poorest of the poor. “It is the same Jesus.”

Let us learn how to touch the fragile Body of Christ from that Mother who first received Him on earth. Our Lady knows how to receive him perfectly, as she did at the Annunciation, and will teach us how to receive the Body of Christ, both in the Eucharist and in poverty-stricken humanity. We can receive Him with the purity of her Immaculate Heart, if we stay devoted to her.

Mother Teresa and Soviet Atheism

Today the Church celebrates Laetare Sunday, named for the first word in the introit or entrance antiphon: Laetare Ierusalem. Rejoice, O City of men, for God is within you! Our Gospel story is of a man born blind (born in Original Sin) who washes in the pool of Siloam (the pool of “the One Sent”). Only baptism in Christ Jesus heals the man who gropes in the darkness of a world without God. Let’s go to Soviet Russia to see what a city without God would look like. In 1917, Vladimir Lenin and his poor blind Bolsheviks attempted to annihilate any trace of God in their grand social experiment. In 1931, for example, Stalin dynamited the largest Orthodox church ever built, Moscow’s cathedral of Christ the Savior. He began work on a colossal statue of Lenin that would stand in its place. Every single Catholic parish in Russia was destroyed, or converted into warehouses or sports clubs. A great darkness closed in. The Soviet Union, they said, was impenetrable to the Gospel.

Somehow, though, decades before religion was legal again in Russia, Mother Teresa and her sisters slipped into Moscow. She tells this story from those days before 1989: “One doctor in charge of a very big hospital accepted us, and we came there and he gave us three rooms. And we began the work in that place by cleaning the toilets—that was our first apostolic work. …We had a little tabernacle, we had Holy Mass, and the priest gave us Jesus and he changed the whole attitude—the whole place looked quite different after. …After one week, the doctor came to me and said, “Mother Teresa, what’s happening in my hospital?” I said, “I don’t know, doctor, what, what is happening?” He said, “I don’t know, something is happening. I see the nurses and the doctors much more kind, much more loving with the patients. I see the patients are not screaming with pain as before. What’s happening? What are the sisters doing?” And I looked at him and I said, “Doctor, you know what is happening? Jesus is in this house now. There in that little chapel. He is living, He is loving, He is there, He’s the cause, He’s the giver of this joy, of this peace, of this love.” And he just shook his head, “Thank you.” And it was wonderful to feel that Presence of Jesus in that hospital after seventy years.”

American Atheism

Our government has not waged a frontal war on God like the Soviets. American atheism is a personal choice, and all of us have chosen it to some degree. Our lives are growing darker as we go about our daily lives ignoring God’s laws. Take the odd phenomena of Road Rage, for example. It is barbaric, but what causes it? Well, consider what most folks listen to in their cars, some for hours on end. It’s usually rap or rock music, or news, or talk shows, that only stir up anger, fear, and discouragement because it ignores even the idea of God, and often ridicules those who believe in God. People used to have bumper stickers: “God is my co-pilot.” But rarely now do we imagine God co-piloting our cars, or our lives. Our freeways have become darker, less-friendly, more dangerous places. So have our schools, our neighborhoods, and our politics.

In 1863, President Lincoln spoke to a nation that was, in his words, “faced with a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity.”  Are we not engaged today in a cultural civil war of “unequaled magnitude?” Lincoln begged the American people to “fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes.”  The President of the United States urged Americans to return to God’s will. All the newspapers affirmed his prophetic utterance. Can you imagine any news media, liberal or conservative, urging us to trust in God’s will and His laws today?

Hope

And yet: there is good reason for hope. We know how bright life can be when we order our lives for God through regular prayer and the exercise of charity. We can throw Jesus out of our cities, but we can also welcome Him back. We can bathe in the waters of His grace, as he instructed the Blind Man: “Go, wash in the waters of Siloam.” We Catholics have three treasures that keep God’s light brightly burning in our cities: Mass, confession, and the rosary. At TAC we get good marks on Mass and confessions, but there is the third treasure, the rosary. Do not underestimate the practice of the rosary. “The rosary,” wrote Blessed John Paul II in 2002, "is my favorite prayer. A marvelous prayer! Marvelous in its simplicity and its depth.” All of us can pray the rosary daily, or at least a decade daily. Our country needs what only we Catholics can give: The Eucharist, sacramental Penance, and daily consecration to the Mother of God.

Joy

The good people of Russia have rebuilt the cathedral Stalin dynamited in 1931. The colossal statue of Lenin was never erected. Jesus Christ has won the war, even though the battle for individual souls, and the souls of nations, rages on. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asked the blind man. “Yes, Lord, I do believe,” and he worshipped Him. For each of us, light and joy flood our lives when we echo that blind man’s faith, when we come back to right worship, ortho-doxy. Yes, Lord, I do believe. I worship, not myself or any other, but You alone.

Yesterday was Mother Teresa’s Day. Since she has not been canonized, she is not yet on the liturgical calendar, but she died—or was born into eternal life—on September 5, 1997. I spent most of April that year in Calcutta and saw her almost every day, and saw Jesus every day in the poorest of the poor. Mother taught me, and the many volunteers who came to Calcutta, to see Jesus in every person. One morning I was carrying a dying man back to his bed in Mother Teresa’s home for the dying destitutes. Like a thunderbolt striking me, I realized with absolute conviction that I held Jesus in my arms. I’ve struggled over the years to maintain that conviction, but it dims and fades with time and trouble. But yesterday, Mother Teresa’s Day, I saw Him again.

It was my day off, so after Mass I stuffed some books in a lawn chair and headed for the beach. Many Americans these days flaunt tattoos, body piercings, and shock-jock hair. I passed many such people on the way to the sands, and it irritated and depressed me. What do they think they are communicating with these “body statements?” Can’t they see they only ape the thoughtless barbarism everyone sees on Television? When is America going to grow up?

Such were my grumblings as I made my way to the ocean. Since it was hot, I stopped in one of those gas station mini-marts for a bottle of cold tea. I got in line with all the other barbarians to pay and saw that the young lady at the counter had two cheek piercings and purple hair. “That will be $1.04,” she said with a radiant smile. “Hmmm, not the usual pasted-on smile at the cash register,” I mused (another thing: salespeople almost never even look at you when they take your money these days). I gave her a dollar and four pennies, trying to limit personal interaction. “Thank you for exact change,” she said, looking at me with joy. “You’re welcome” I mumbled, and headed off. “Have a wonderful day,” she called after me, and I turned to look at her. She was positively beaming. Her purple hair and twittering cheek piercings faded beneath this angelic radiance. “Thank you,” I smiled. She gave a little wave and turned to the next customer.


Yesterday, Mother Teresa’s Day, I saw Jesus again, beneath his distressing disguise. Certainly the barbarism of our time—the spiritual poverty of the West— is senseless, as senseless as the poverty of Calcutta. But beneath even this disguise, Jesus smiles at us. Thank you, Mother Teresa, for showing me Jesus again. Thanks Mom!