There are many things about Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta that
could be called heroic – her tireless service to the world's most
rejected and her courageous witness to millions of what it is to live
the Gospel, just to name a couple. But the priest charged with overseeing her path to sainthood said
that for him, one thing stands out above all the rest: her experience of
spiritual darkness and what she described as feeling totally abandoned
by God for the majority of her life. “The single most heroic thing is exactly her darkness. That pure
living, that pure, naked faith,” Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator
for Mother Teresa's canonization cause, told CNA in an interview. Fr.
Kolodiejchuk is a priest of the Missionaries of Charity Fathers, founded
by Mother Teresa in 1989. By undergoing the depth and duration of the desolation she
experienced and doing everything that she did for others in spite of it,
“that's really very heroic,” he said. Pope Francis recently approved the second and last miracle needed in
order to declare Mother Teresa a saint, and has set the date of her
canonization for Sept. 4, 2016 – the day before her feast day. Read more here.
The spiritual climax of the Gospel of John, as Father John Waiss points out, occurs at the foot of the Cross, where Jesus utters his parting words: “Woman, behold, your son!” and “Behold your mother!” (John 19:26-27). While these words were addressed to the Apostle John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, the Church has long understood this moment as a universal adoption. To truly image Christ, we must share in His parentage; if we embrace God as our spiritual Father but reject Mary as our mother, we treat Christ as a half-brother rather than our "firstborn among many brethren" (Rom. 8:29). As Origen noted as early as the third century, the profound depths of the Gospel are only accessible to those who, like John, rest their heads on Jesus’ breast and receive Mary into their own homes. This maternal role is deeply rooted in biblical typology, positioning Mary as the fulfillment of the great mothers of the Old Covenant. She is the New Eve , the mother of all the living according ...