The Canonization of Mother Teresa

 From Fr. Rutler:

The canonization of Teresa of Calcutta gives the kind of satisfaction that comes from having your mother declared Mother of the Year. More important is the fact that she is a mother. Demographically, the cradles of our land are covered with cobwebs. Motherhood itself is in danger. To prefer motherhood over a corporate career may seem an insult to the autonomous self. At the 2016 Democratic convention, a speaker was cheered when she announced that she had aborted her baby for the sake of her of her professional job. A macabre acoustics twisted Rachel weeping for her children who were not, into Rachel laughing because her children were not. This also obtains in some religious orders: Reverend Mothers have refashioned themselves as presidents, declaiming “peace and justice and climate change” instead of salvation. As one cannot fool Mother Church for long, those orders are evaporating.

Experience is a relentless mentor, and hard experience teaches that Satan hates mothers, biological and spiritual. Mother Teresa was a mother for an orphaned world, and her canonization will bring out the banshees barking. The infernal vaults shudder every time a saint is placed on the calendar. But every slur and slander is the Anti-Christ’s backward Te Deum. Various websites already are denouncing the event, and I have read one by a recent graduate of a university where Mother Teresa gave a commencement address and was booed for mentioning chastity. The graduates in that crowd probably thought themselves the brightest and best of their generation, and since then, some have aborted many of their sons and daughters who might have been as intelligent and, by God’s grace, wiser than they. How many of their children might have grown up to write symphonies and paint great murals and cured cancers? To ask that question is the only utterance our libertine culture considers obscene.

As for haters, the Marxist historian of India, Vijay Prashad, has expressed his chagrin at the canonization of Mother. The odd intensity of his scorn seems exaggerated in one who considers the Church irrelevant. Mother is not his only target. Among other causes, he is a member of the advisory board of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. The Pakistani radical, Tariq Ali, has indicted Mother for speaking to dictators, while he wept at the death of his hero Che Guevara and called Hugo Chavez a “political great.” In fairness to him, he called the vaudeville atheist Christopher Hitchens, a “saloon-bar boor” but only after Hitchens, like a broken clock that is right twice a day, had said that his hero Trotsky was not perfect. Those who delicately called Hitchens a curmudgeon, might also say Caligula was a tease and Ghengis Khan was hyperactive. Hitchens published some comments about Mother not suitable for print. One does not need to be a Freudian to trace his animus to the day he had to identify the corpse of his own mother after she had committed suicide. He wrote beautifully and, had he analyzed himself, he might have written pages about mother even finer than Muggeridge’s “Something Beautiful for God.” In preparing the memorial Mass for William F. Buckley in the Cathedral of Saint Patrick, I chose the hymns. Hitchens attended and sang those hymns lustily, telling someone later that he liked a good tune. It would be a high favor if on the day of her canonization, Mother was able to pull him up close to her as a son, putting the words to the music.

Mother’s Marxist defamers will have to contend with God’s elegant moral asymmetry by which Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born in Skopje, in present day Macedonia, and had citizenships over the early violent years as an Ottoman, Serbian and Yugoslavian. Her homeland was the notorious ground of tension between Josip Broz “Tito” and Enver Hoxha whose Albanian state was probably the world’s only officially atheist country. Its priests were slaughtered and, by May 1967, all 2,169 churches and shrines were confiscated, a decade before a new constitution prohibited all “fascist, religious, warmongerish, antisocialist activity and propaganda.” Those tyrants and their hellish utopias are now gone, while Mother’s face smiles on official postage stamps. Saint John Vianney was surprised when a dark voice growled: “If there were three priests like you, my kingdom would be ruined.” May there be more mothers like Mother Teresa, but on her own she was able to harrow a small corner of Hell in the Balkan Peninsula. (Read more.)

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