Mother Teresa will enter into sainthood on September 4, 2016, after a relatively short period of 19 years since her passing away on September 5, 1997. Pope Francis recently recognised a second miracle attributed to her intercession which ‘cured’ a Brazilian patient, awaiting surgery, of an incurable infection in his brain. This ceremony to be performed at St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City will come a mere 13 years after she was beatified on October 19, 2003. While the Church demanded one proven miracle for her to be beatified and another for sainthood to be conferred, the real miracle, I believe, was Mother Teresa’s life itself. It was extraordinary that the strand of divinity remained un-eclipsed from her childhood to her death. For me as well as for millions around the world, her goodness and compassion were so transparent that she was anointed a saint in her lifetime.
Let me briefly encapsulate the many challenges that she faced when she began her work. She was 18 when she was convinced that her life’s vocation lay in her becoming a missionary in far-off India; Skopje, where she was born on August 26, 1910, was so far removed from Bengal that, barring a few Yugoslav Jesuits who fired her young imagination, no one in the small Catholic community would even have known where India lay. Yet the early seeds of her faith and determination impelled her to leave her closely knit family. She found that the route to India lay in her joining the Loreto Order of teaching nuns, who were headquartered in faraway Calcutta. Here she taught for close to 20 years before her true calling propelled her to serve the poor in the streets and slums. The Vatican, fantastically, gave her permission to step outside the Cloister, not as a lay worker but with her religious vows intact, to set up her own order, the Missionaries of Charity. In 1948, Calcutta’s pavements were swarming with teeming millions uprooted by the Partition, who had joined the hapless sufferers of the Great Bengal Famine. Into this sea of tragedy, homelessness, disease and despair stepped a 38-year-old nun, dressed not in a recognisable nun’s habit, but a sari similar to what the municipal sweepresses wore. She had no companion, no helper and no money to speak of. What she did have was a secret calling that her God wanted her to leave the security of the Loreto Convent and minister to Him in his distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor, the abandoned infant, the leprosy sufferer shunned by society and the dying destitute.

At a time when the Raj had left no health care to speak of (1948), she confronted death at every turn. She did what was to become her hallmark. Finding a man dying in the street, she took him to a public hospital, which refused to admit him, precisely on the grounds that since he was about to die they would not waste a hospital bed on a life they said they could not save! Only when she sat before the hospital on a dharna did they relent. The man died within a few hours. It was then that she began to search for a place where she could take those people whom hospitals refused, where she could nurse them — she had some medical training — and they could at least die being comforted and with some dignity. She begged various authorities, and finally an officer in Calcutta Municipality gave her a pilgrims’ hall adjacent to the Kalighat temple, where she requested the police and municipal authorities to bring her all and any of those dying whom the hospitals refused. That policy continues.

I have been so many times to this hospice at Kalighat, that I did not need to ask Mother Teresa why she had not set up the hospital that Christopher Hitchens would later criticise her for not doing. I knew that a hospital would tie down dozens of her Sisters to a single establishment, and then who would care for those who fell by the wayside? The infant abandoned on a street, the sick and elderly turned out of their homes, the leprosy sufferers or AIDS patient that no one wanted to go near, let alone touch? How many of us step out of our cars to do anything for the desperately poor we see on the streets? We only have to look within us to know that those who are quick to criticise her are unwilling to do anything to help with their own hands.

Once described as a ‘religious imperialist’ and more commonly regarded as a saint, Mother Teresa was at many levels a very ordinary woman, yet someone who led one of the most extraordinary lives of her century. Armed only with an abundance of faith, she proceeded with one small but determined step at a time. By the time she passed away 19 years ago, she had created a multinational organisation that spanned 123 countries that served her special constituency of the ‘poorest of the poor’. In the process, she was acknowledged as one of the world’s principal conscience-keepers.

Although she herself remained staunchly Catholic, her brand of religion was not exclusive. Convinced that each person she ministered to was Christ in suffering, she reached out to people of all faiths. The very faith that sustained her infuriated her detractors, who saw her as a symbol of a right-wing conspiracy and, worse, the principal mouthpiece of the Vatican’s well-known views against abortion and birth control. These were indeed her views and she was undeterred by such criticism. It was the one subject that she and I never did agree upon. I would cite the Malthusian formula while she would answer that she could take care of every unwanted child.

In the course of researching my biography, I asked her why she took money from dodgy characters like Haiti’s dictator Duvalier. Her answer was concise. Everyone, she said, had a right to give in charity. How was this different from thousands of people who each day fed the poor? “I have no right to judge them. God alone has that right.” And again, “I accept no salary, no government grant, no church funding, nothing. I do not ask for money. But people have a right to give.”

She had a clear vision of the street and a determination that she often tempered with a sense of humour.

In the end, she gently but unmistakably left her imprint at the heart of the Vatican itself. Finding in Pope John Paul II a kindred spirit, she cajoled him into opening a small soup kitchen around the corner from the Great Basilica of St. Peter’s where the grand ceremony will be held to declare her a Saint. At four every evening, Rome’s homeless and hungry queue up to be fed by Mother Teresa’s Sisters and a dozen volunteers. At a stroke this frail nun, indisputably the world’s most decorated person, helped to demystify the Vatican’s centuries-old aura of wealth and power.