From: 98yuwono@cua.edu
Subject: Mother Theresa of Calcutta
Organization: The Catholic University of America
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 15:38:20 GMT

                         Copyright 1992 Southam Inc.
                                 Calgary Herald

                    August 29, 1992, Saturday, FINAL EDITION

SECTION: RELIGION; Pg. C8

LENGTH: 762 words

HEADLINE: Two Sides of the Coin: A humble toiler finds Christ in faces
of the world's poor

BYLINE: GEORGE CORNELL, AP

 BODY:
    Under glittering chandeliers, an elite throng in sequined gowns
and white dinner jackets filled the ballroom.

   The podium brimmed with regally robed Roman Catholic cardinals and
archbishops.

   Into this scene of magisterial affluence at the Marriott Marquis
Hotel on New York's Times Square, a tiny, slightly stooped old woman
from the haunts of the wretched was led to the dais.

   As if proclaiming the approach of a reigning monarch or president,
the presiding officer boomed out, "Mother Teresa of Calcutta!"

   The elegant crowd rose to its feet in a tide of sustained, admiring
applause.

   Mother Teresa, 81, a cotton veil rimming her wrinkled face, told
the imposing gathering of the Supreme Council of the Knights of
Columbus about sheltering a dying derelict crawling with worms.

   "It took three hours to pick from his body all the worms," she
related in mellow tones. She said the emaciated man murmured
gratefully that he had lived like "an animal" but now could die "like
an angel."

   He went "home to God" with a "joyful heart" because he had received
"tender love and care," said the nun. "God was with him . . . . We
must thank God for the beautiful way in which we sense God in the
poorest of the poor."

   It was a striking contrast the mighty and well-off of American
Catholicism in formal finery, seated at rose-bedecked tables, paying
homage to this humble, aged toiler among the destitute.

   Mother Teresa and several accompanying members of her worldwide
order, the Missionaries of Charity, clad in blue-trimmed cotton saris
of India, declined to stay for the lavish dinner that evening.

   They slipped away beforehand. She insists that any dinner honoring
her should go to feed the hungry.

   As a result, the presiding supreme knight, Virgil Duchant, of New
Haven, Conn., said the organization had agreed to give her order an
amount matching the dinner costs about $ 100,000 US.

   That was in addition to the Knights of Columbus presenting Mother
Teresa with its $ 100,000 US Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope) Award for
serving Christ and humanity.

   Several years ago, she had turned down the Knights of Columbus when
they offered annual, permanent support for her work.
                                                                                
   She believes that work always must depend on God to provide for it.

   A fiscal guarantee from the Knights, she apparently felt, somehow
would undermine her cause since her order would not be as reliant on
God for sustenance.

   It's an unusual rationale in this materialistic world.

   "The saint of the gutters," she is called. Simple, selfless, soft
spoken, physically frail, nonetheless she has some magnetic charisma
that has enabled her to enlist nearly 4,000 members in 102 countries.

   Her order now runs 468 homes for the poor, sick and dying. She
started it in 1950 in the squalor of Calcutta, her home base in India.

   She was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in
1972, the Nobel Prize in 1977.

   The crucified Jesus, she maintains, is present and seen in faces of
the stricken and weak.

   She noted that he said in Scripture that "whatever you do to the
least of these" the hungry, homeless, imprisoned, sick "you do it to
me," and that people would be judged on that basis in the hereafter.

   How beautiful,' she said, "to be 24 hours every day with Jesus in
the poorest of the poor" the unfed, unwanted, abandoned, crippled and
dying.

   Wherever she went on her visit to New York to one of her order's
homes in slums of the South Bronx, to worship at St. Patrick's
Cathedral and to other points people trailed her, extolling her,
reaching to touch her.

   The incidents, as recounted by New York's Cardinal John O'Connor,
resembled episodes in the New Testament when crowds flocked behind
Jesus, feeling that just to touch his garment would strengthen them.

   Mother Teresa herself has suffered severe illnesses, including
heart attacks in 1983 and 1989.

   In 1990, she resigned from her order. The Pope agreed to it. But
her nuns promptly re-elected her superior general anyhow.

   Over the years, Mother Teresa occasionally has consented to leave
her abode with the indigent, meeting with queens, presidents and pope.
The encounters always reflect the great contrast between their realm
and hers.

   It was that way in the meeting with the Knights of Columbus, whom
she thanked for their charities.

   But before she left for a waiting car, trailed by curiously excited
sophisticates, she urged:

   "Pray also for the people who have suffered so much not because
they are hungry for bread but because they are hungry for love."
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* Leonardus K. Yuwono			   *   	
* Internet: 98yuwono@cuavax.dnet.cua.edu   *  
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