A Little Commentary on the Canonization of Mother of Teresa

A reader who wanted to contact me offline via my wife wondered why The Remnant and Church Militant hadn’t had any commentary on the Sunday canonization of Saint Teresa of Calcutta.  As for the former, they have, at least in a way, which I share below; regarding the latter, I have no idea, I really have no interaction with them anymore.  I think Church Militant would find it problematic to be critical, however, since this canonization is closely associated with the kinds of virtues this pontificate wants to stress – corporal over spiritual, active over contemplative.  But perhaps they already have been, I dunno.

At any rate, here is what The Remnant posted, not on their website, but on Youtube, where all the kool kids go these days:

My sentiments align very closely with the priests.  Who wants to criticize Mother Teresa?  I wish I were much more like her in most important respects.  Her practice of the corporal works of mercy was simply amazing, I would say, clearly supernatural.  She had an awesome ability to give of herself and ask nothing in return. She gave great witness to the Truth on very important issues like abortion and the culture of disposable human beings.  She’s one of the few well known and truly popular Catholic figures around the world who doesn’t have much if any negative stigma attached – very much a saint for our times, and for this world.

Which, as the priest notes, is also the problem.  The world could love Mother Teresa because she never demanded anything of the world that the world didn’t have at least a certain predisposition to give. She was, from the world’s perspective, the best kind of Catholic – holy, but keeping her holiness very much to herself, except when it came to doing manifestly good things for others, but never demanding or even recommending a change in the behavior of those she so ably served.  That is to say, there were few calls to conversion, save for the tacit one which was the witness of her life.  Now this was an awesome one, but many would have preferred she would preach the glory of Jesus Christ and the necessity of His Church for salvation with at least a little more effort.

She even frequently confirmed people in their false and erroneous religions much of the time, far from preaching even a very gentle message of evangelization.

Many saw a tendency to religious indifference in Mother Teresa that was perhaps an unintentional absorption of the modernism which has run amok in the Church over the past two-plus generations.  When I say that her form of evangelization was the conduct of her life, I do not mean to underestimate that in the least.  Based on that conduct, and with very little (if any) preaching/evangelizing, Mother Teresa did attract thousands of converts and formed a whole new (and vibrant) religious order.  We have had some interaction with the local Missionaries of Charity and they are dear, sweet, giving women, whose outlook on the Faith is not difficult to reconcile with the traditional practice of it.  They assist at the TLM at least occasionally.

For me, the biggest problem is one of process, wherein we see, at least for certain, politically popular individuals, the chucking of centuries old processes intended to insure that those individuals who were canonized were of the highest caliber of faith and of unimpeachable character, with no taint of any kind attached.  But since John Paul II chucked the office of “devil’s advocate,” there has been an increasing number of Saints produced whose record is not always as pure as one might hope.  At least Mother Teresa had two recognized miracles, instead of one as now seems to be the standard for canonizing post-conciliar popes.

In reality, I don’t want to come off as harsh, or critical of her canonization.  I have concerns, like the priest, but who am I?  I pray for a fraction of the sanctity Saint Teresa of Calcutta evidenced on a daily basis.  If The Remnant and others aren’t writing negatively about this, they probably feel the same way.