St. Teresa of Kolkata Feast Day Mass 2017

Published: September 5, 2017

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor preached the following homily during the annual memorial Mass for St. Teresa of Kolkata (formerly Mother Teresa of Calcutta) at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church in Little Rock on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2017. It was based on the readings for Tuesday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Cycle 1.

Bishop Taylor

Today’s Gospel speaks of “a man with an unclean spirit.” Like with many of the people that Mother Teresa served on the streets of Calcutta, there was something wrong with this man, something bad wrong.

In the midst of the service, this man completely lost control of himself and started screaming at Jesus. But his words made little or no sense. In those days most maladies were attributed to demons. At any rate, this man was in bad shape. And then in our Gospel we see that Jesus cast out the demon and set that man free.

In today’s world there are many desperate problems. There are political refugees fleeing war zones and economic refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. It doesn’t seem fair that some children are born into privilege, while other children are disadvantaged from the day of their birth. Some loved and protected, others neglected.

Why did Jesus heal that one man in our Gospel and not everyone in the whole country? The Missionaries of Charity serve the poor with tremendous love, but so much suffering remains. Can’t God do something about this? When we talk like this, we are ultimately wondering about God.

If God is all good and all powerful, why does he permit so much suffering? Why did he let four Missionaries of Charity be murdered in Yemen a few years ago. Why do we have such unjust immigration laws?

This is the question of evil, how God can permit evil, and it is a very difficult question, the answer to which really only God knows. But there are a few things we can say. One is this: If you had the power to create a better world, what would it look like?

Naturally we would want everyone to be happy, but if you think we would necessarily be happy in a trouble-free world, consider this: When a football team leaves the field after a game in which they played well and won, you can be sure that physically they will feel battered and bruised.

Especially if it was a rough game, in which they tried hard and really worked as a team. They may feel battered physically but they leave that field ecstatically happy because they had won. They had prevailed in the struggle.

It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilling world than one in which there was nothing hard to do. No challenges to face, no adversity to overcome. Some of the happiest moments of my life have come from my hardest-fought victories. Things that I have achieved at the cost of sacrifice and hard work.

And wasn’t that even more the case in the life of Mother Teresa and the ministry of the Missionaries of Charity here in Arkansas, as everywhere else in the world? This kind of happiness would not occur in a trouble-free world.

The people whom we admire most are those men and women like Mother Teresa and the soon-to-be beatified Father Stanley Rother who devoted their lives to a cause in which they deeply believed, and who like Jesus, did so regardless of the consequences.

Mother Teresa had to overcome countless obstacles with determination and persistence. Father Rother stayed with his flock in their time of distress and paid for it with his life. How could that kind of character be possible in a world in which the good were always protected and the wicked always punished?

Our world was created by a God who is far wiser than any of us. If we start with the realization that the purpose of life is not merely happiness, but rather character — to know him, love him and serve him in this life in order to be happy with him forever in the next — it would be hard to imagine a better world for the development of character.

And of course the ultimate proof of that is the cross of Jesus Christ. Now let me be clear, I do not approve of human suffering, nor do I pretend to know the full answer to the problem of suffering. But I am convinced that God does have an answer that exceeds our present ability to understand, and that one day we will understand.

In the meantime, we should simply trust the Lord and work with him for the making of a better world. Today Jesus freed a man from an unclean spirit and in the process we discover that he is the Holy One of God. It is to that same Jesus that you and I give witness when like Mother Teresa, we too embrace the cross of Jesus with sacrificial love.