A Pencil in God's Hand
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was already a happy nun teaching in India. But on a train ride to Darjeeling, she heard a "call within a call." Jesus asked her to leave the safety of the convent and serve the "poorest of the poor" in the slums. She swapped her habit for a simple white sari with blue stripes. Fashion icon status: Achieved.
Her entire mission was driven by the words of Jesus on the Cross: "I Thirst." She wasn't just trying to solve poverty (which she knew she couldn't end); she was trying to quench the thirst of Jesus for love. She saw Jesus in "the distressing disguise of the poor."
After her death, her private letters revealed a shocking secret: for the last 50 years of her life, she felt no presence of God. Just emptiness. Yet, she continued to smile and work. She shared in Christ's abandonment on the Cross. It was a 50-year spiritual dry spell, yet she never quit.
The medical practice of the Missionaries of Charity has drawn documented criticism. Robin Fox, then editor of The Lancet, visited the Home for the Dying in Kolkata and wrote on September 17, 1994 that the sisters did not reliably distinguish curable from incurable patients, had no strong painkillers on the formulary, and rinsed needles in warm water. Christopher Hitchens made a wider case in his 1994 Channel 4 film Hell's Angel and his 1995 book The Missionary Position, faulting her acceptance of money from the financier Charles Keating, later convicted of fraud, and her 1992 letter asking his trial judge for leniency, to which a deputy district attorney published a reply she did not answer publicly. Her defenders answer that the homes were hospices for the destitute dying rather than hospitals, that the poverty of the sisters was deliberate, that the Keating money had been spent on the poor before his fraud came to light, and that her positions on contraception and abortion were the settled teaching of the Church. No legal or ecclesiastical finding was ever made against her. The objections were placed before the Congregation for the Causes of Saints during her cause, and she was beatified in 2003 and canonized on September 4, 2016.