The
Catholic Weekly
Online
Sydney
19 October 2003
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Peace
in our hands
Jubilee
week for Pope
Special
guests at Mother Teresa’s beatification
School
insurance hike
Honoured
by university
It’s
truly feminine and truly beautiful
Spiritually
renewed by Lourdes
$1.75m
for Caritas
Catholic
Women’s Network
Board
short bonanza for Vinnies
Advice
to lectors, acolytes
Much
deeper reality
Editorial:
Time for tribute
Letters:
Barrel of a gun
Conversation:
Terry Hanley, lay missionary who has spent nearly 15 years in the field - Happy
to ‘spend rest of my life in Africa’
What
is peace like?
Religion
test upsurge
Malouf
on campus
Ministry
of Jesus to the sick and dying
‘Father,
this is your life’
‘Priest
in residence’ honoured
Bushland
setting for Thurgoona church
Full-on
disciple of Jesus
Active
practice of faith
Requiem
Mass for ‘Bacon Priest’
Special guests at Mother Teresa’s beatification
There will be many official delegations at the beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but members of the Missionaries of Charity are focusing their attention on a less formal group of special guests.
Seats at the ceremony in St Peter’s Square already have been reserved for 3000 men, women and children who eat or sleep at the soup kitchens and shelters in Rome run by members of the order founded by Mother Teresa.
Immediately after the October 19 Mass, they will be served lunch in the Vatican’s audience hall.
Missionaries of Charity Fr Brian Kolodiejchuk, promoter of her cause, says the beatification is “a celebration to give glory to God for what he has done through Mother Teresa … Mother Teresa does not need our applause”.
Working in temporary offices set up in the order’s Rome shelter for homeless men, he said the Missionaries of Charity hope the beatification will cause a “ripple effect”, reminding the world of the call to serve God in the poor.
While there is no doubt Mother Teresa was a “missionary” of charity and never hid her Catholic faith, winning converts to Catholicism was not the first focus of her work, he said.
“She wanted to proclaim the Gospel not with words, but by being a light, a radiance of God’s presence,” he said.
• The beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be celebrated in Sydney on the day of the Rome ceremony at a Mass at St Mary’s Cathedral.
The Mass, at 10.30am on Sunday, October 19, will be attended by the inheritors of her vision, her Australian Missionary of Charity sisters.