Mother Teresa of Calcutta and her Vision of Jesus
It wasn't until after her death, for the vast majority
of people, that this part of Mother Teresa's spiritual life was uncovered. “It
was a big discovery,” Missionary of Charity priest, Fr. Vazhakala told CNA.
When
Mother Teresa's cause for canonization was opened, just two years after her
death in 1997, documents were found in the archives of the Jesuits in Calcutta,
with the spiritual director and another of Mother Teresa's close priest
friends, and in the office of the bishop, containing her accounts of the
communications.
Fr.
Vazhakala, who co-founded the contemplative branch of the Missionaries of
Charity alongside Mother Teresa, said he has a document handwritten by Mother
Teresa where she discusses what Jesus spoke to her directly during the time of
the locutions and visions.
During a period lasting from Sept. 10, 1946 to Dec. 3,
1947, Mother Teresa had ongoing communication with Jesus through words and
visions, Fr. Vazhakala said. This all happened while she was a missionary
sister in the Irish order of the Sisters of Loreto, teaching at St. Mary's
school in Calcutta.
Mother
Teresa wrote that one day at Holy Communion, she heard Jesus say, “I want
Indian nuns, victims of my love, who would be Mary and Martha, who would be so
united to me as to radiate my love on souls.”
It
was through these communications of the Eucharistic Jesus that Mother Teresa
received her directions for forming her congregation of the Missionaries of
Charity.
“She
was so united with Jesus,” Fr. Vazhakala explained, “that she was able to
radiate not her love, but Jesus’ love through her, and with a human
expression.”
Jesus
told her what sort of nuns he wanted her order to be filled with: “'I want free
nuns covered with the poverty of the Cross. I want obedient nuns covered with
the obedience of the Cross. I want full-of-love nuns covered with the charity
of the Cross,'” Fr. Vazhakala related.
According
to the Missionary, Jesus asked her, “Would you refuse to do this for me?” “In
fact, Jesus told her in 1947,” Fr. Vazhakala explained, “'I cannot go alone to
the poor people, you carry me with you into them.'”
After
this period of joy and consolation, around 1949, Mother Teresa started to
experience a “terrible darkness and dryness” in her spiritual life, said Fr.
Vazhakala. “And in the beginning she thought it was because of her own
sinfulness, unworthiness, her own weakness.”
Mother
Teresa's spiritual director at the time helped her to understand that this
spiritual dryness was just another way that Jesus wanted her to share in the
poverty of the poor of Calcutta.
This period lasted nearly 50 years, until her death,
and she found it very painful. But, Fr. Vazhakala shared that she said, “If my
darkness and dryness can be a light to some soul let me be the first one to do
that. If my life, if my suffering, is going to help souls to be saved, then I
will prefer from the creation of the world to the end of time to suffer and
die.”
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