Surrounded by soldiers, the tiny pale figure in the tiny pale coffin seemed so slight and oddly out of place that at any moment one half expected her to float free of her lumbering, rubber-tired mooring. While the hundreds of thousands who watched Mother Teresa’s funeral cortege fell far short of the 1 million people who had been expected, those who were there responded with emotion. Here and there, flower petals showered down from rooftops and from behind bamboo barricades. At one point a surging crowd broke loose to touch Teresa’s hands, folded in a rosary. But the solders quickly formed a human barrier, and the nearly 500 mourners who tried to run alongside the swiftly moving carriage fell back in exhaustion.
In death as in life, Mother Teresa remained what the Gospels call ““a sign of contradiction’’ to the world. Her humility was burdened by celebrity. She raised millions for her work but lived simply, befriending the rich and famous to aid the poor and anonymous. She was a woman of power in a church run by men. Although a missionary of Christ, she insisted that God wanted Hindus to be good Hindus, Muslims good Muslims. Indians were wary of her at first, questioning her intentions. In Calcutta, the mostly Marxist politicians resented her hold on the poor, the class they themselves were supposed to represent. Feminists everywhere fumed at this virgin-mother figure for her firm opposition to abortion and contraception–especially in a country beset by overpopulation. But in India, where Hindus worship a variety of gods and goddesses, masses associated this Roman Catholic nun from Eastern Europe with the benevolent Mother Goddess.
Hence the greatest anomaly of all: a woman whom much of the world revered as a living saint must await the considered judgment of her own church as to whether she deserves posthumous canonization as Catholic saint as well. Catholics believe that only God makes saints. But the church does canonize a chosen few as examples for others to follow. In most cases, the road to canonization is long–50 years is average, though many take a century or more–and complicated. As pope, John Paul II has the power to waive the process and proclaim Mother Teresa a saint. Will he?
Her funeral mass provided no hint. Compared with the regal funeral for Princess Diana the previous week, the last rites for Mother Teresa were prosaic. A full-dress pontifical mass at St. Peter’s in Rome would have provided greater visual spectacle, but the service at Calcutta’s Netaji Indoor Stadium was perhaps more fitting. The best seats in the house were squishy armchairs and couches that looked as if they had been hastily borrowed for the occasion. In them sat the queens of Spain, Belgium and Jordan as well as Hillary Rodham Clinton, the presidents of Italy and Ghana, among other dignitaries.
The panoply of Catholic prelates in their pointed miters seemed properly out of place in India. Like Teresa herself, they were spiritual guests in a country where Christians count for no more than 2 to 4 percent of the population. The sermons were adequate yet hardly eloquent. But in a way that did not matter. It was enough, as Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican’s secretary of state, said in his eulogy, that Mother Teresa had exemplified the down-to-earth advice from Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel: ““What you do for the least of these my brothers, you do for me.’’ There was no lofty Gregorian chant. The choir of nuns sang in Hindi and Bengali, accompanied by Indian instruments. The gifts brought to the altar were borne by the lame and halt. And at the close, representatives of India’s other religions–Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist and Parsee–stepped forward to offer blessings from their own traditions. Mother Teresa surely would have relished that.
After the funeral, the body of Mother Teresa was buried in a corner of the convent that had been her home. Earlier in the week, Indians at the rate of 200,000 a day had come to pay their respects, touching the soles of her feet. Outside the city’s holiest temple, where every morning blood sacrifices are made to a stone and gold statue of Kali, devotees paused before a life-size figure of Mother Teresa to pray and pay obeisance. ““We think of Mother not as a Christian but simply as Mother,’’ said Samir Banerjee, a Brahmin priest from the temple. ““She was just the Mother of us all.’’ India is not the poorest country in the world, but it may be the most naturally religious. Most Indians believe that this life is followed by another, and so there was almost no weeping at the passing of Mother Teresa. Instead, there was gratitude for a woman many thought heaven-sent to the people of Calcutta. ““She sacrificed herself to the poor,’’ said Sandihaya Singha, a 45-year-old Hindu woman. ““To do so much, she must have had supernatural power.''
If Bengal were a Roman Catholic state, the Virgin Mary would be the reigning icon. In this Hindu center, Kali rules; even many government Marxists are Kali worshipers. This reverence for a female deity helps explain why a sari-clad Roman Catholic nun from the West could move so easily among the masses–and keep her secular critics at bay. It rankled many city fathers that Mother Teresa’s work among the poor gave Calcutta an unfair international image of urban poverty. ““People all over the world see Mother caressing an emaciated dying person, and associate Calcutta with that,’’ says Krishna Maharaj, who heads a religious and social-service organization in the city. ““There are millions of poor people in this city who are earning a living with dignity.’’ But she also brought celebrities, world leaders and other dignitaries to the city. For that, they had to be grateful. Her ““politics’’ was of an altogether different order. Where Marxists see the poor as a class in need of liberation, she saw only individuals, each with special needs. Like Franz Kafka, Mother Teresa recognized that ““the only reality is the concretely real human being, our neighbor, whom God puts in our path.''
India is a country thick with living saints, many of them hailed as incarnations of the ““Devi’’ or ““Divine Mother.’’ But for Roman Catholics, a living saint is, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms. The spiritual powers that Indians attribute to their living saints are, for Catholics, available only through the intercession of those holy men and women who have died in Christ and risen to the glory of God’s kingdom. On earth, it is John Paul II who could quickly elevate Mother Teresa. Precedent, however, suggests that he will not.
The last time a pope tried immediately to canonize a woman occurred in 1253, when the process was much different, simpler and far faster. Like Mother Teresa, Clare of Assisi (a spiritual sister to Saint Francis of Assisi) was widely regarded during her lifetime as a saint for her deep spirituality. Like John Paul II, who looked to Mother Teresa for inspiration, popes sought out Clare in her cloistered convent for advice. At her death, Pope Innocent IV ordered the Office of the Angels sung at her funeral, signifying her sainthood. Officials of the papal court dissuaded him at the last moment and, two years later, she was canonized by his successor.
More recently, there was an effort during Vatican Council II (1962-65) to proclaim Pope John XXIII a saint by the acclamation of the Council Fathers. John had died just after the council had begun and the bishops were overwhelmed by the praise the world–both secular and religious–heaped upon the genial pope. Inside the council, progressive bishops mounted a campaign to canonize John by acclamation of the assembled prelates and thus bypass the rigorous church process. In part, their move was political: if the council proclaimed John a saint, progressives believed that they would also prevail against conservatives who were blocking various liberal reforms.
But the conservative bishops had their own candidate for canonization–Pope Pius XII, who had died in 1958. There was, meanwhile, no precedent for a council declaring someone a saint. Faced with an unruly conflict among the bishops, Pope Paul VI resolved the issue in Solomon-like fashion. On Nov. 18, 1965, he announced that causes on behalf of both of his predecessors would be initiated, thereby satisfying neither side. The two candidates are still under study, and neither is likely to be canonized until well into the next century–if ever.
But Mother Teresa is different. Her appeal cuts across ideological lines and–more important–she has great support among the mass of Roman Catholics, as well as the deep personal affection of John Paul II himself. Last week the two most powerful Vatican officials apart from the pope–Cardinal Sodano and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith–suggested that the pope could and likely would speed up the process of canonization on behalf of Mother Teresa. But how this might work is far from clear.
CURRENT VATICAN LEGISLAtion stipulates that a minimum of five years must elapse before a canonization process can begin; in most cases, it is 10 years. The purpose is to see whether a candidate’s reputation for holiness ripens and spreads. But in the case of Mother Teresa, says Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel, a veteran official of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, ““she already has a worldwide reputation for holiness, and it most likely will continue.’’ Thus, it seems likely that the pope will waive the five-year rule so that the process can begin immediately. And as Cardinal Ratzinger indicated last week, the pope will probably assign her cause top priority.
The pope could also waive the rule that requires candidates for sainthood to have at least one miracle credited to them–one that takes place after death. (Mother Teresa might have walked on water every day to work but that would have had no bearing on her case.) The church figures that even the most meticulous investigation of a candidate’s life is subject to human error. Therefore, it demands a sign from God in the form of a miracle to confirm the investigators’ human judgment. In nearly all cases, they are healings for which medical science can give no explanation. These, of course, are rare: the Congregation for the Causes of Saints has hundreds of cases, some of them centuries old, in which the candidates have yet to produce a miracle through their intercession.
If he chose to disregard the five-year rule and the demand for miraculous intercession, the pope would next be faced with shortening the investigation into Mother Teresa’s life and works. She lived a long life and labored in more than 25 countries. If normal procedures were followed, the church would have to establish tribunals in each of these countries so that witnesses–pro and con–could testify about her life and virtues. That testimony alone could take a decade. And it would certainly take several years more to prepare the documents necessary for the judges assigned to evaluate the tribunals.
Why subject a woman who is universally admired to the rigors of an investigation? One reason would be to discover whether Mother Teresa gave in to pride, the deadliest of sins. Did she, perhaps, lord her celebrity over the other sisters in her order? A thorough investigation would also have to look into charges from critics that she took money from the rich with no thought to how they came by their wealth. If one demands perfection from a saint, the possibilities for finding fault are almost endless. (The one very good reason for allowing a full investigation of her life is this: if it is performed well, the results could produce a more rounded, more human portrait of a woman whose greatest temptation, perhaps, was that everyone treated her like a saint.)
If those three steps were somehow eliminated, the pope, in consultation with his bishops, could decide to proceed directly with the beatification of Mother Teresa. This is the penultimate stage prior to canonization and would allow Catholics to honor her as ““Blessed.’’ Once again, a miracle of intercession would then be required before she could be canonized.
Does it matter? For millions of Cath- olics–and for others as well–Mother Teresa is already a saint. So are figures like Dorothy Day, an American cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, and Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of San Salvador. Neither’s case for sanctity has yet to be confirmed by the church. If saints are models to be imitated, not just powers to be invoked, then Mother Teresa has already joined a long list of figures in whom the grace of God has been manifest to others. In their name, and for their example, there can only be humble thanks and praise.
