Meeting Mother Teresa

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Mother Teresa with Fr Michael Mohally                                    Yesterday, 4 September, Pope Francis canonised St Teresa of Kolkata (Calcuttat). Today is her feast day, the anniversary of her death in 1997. My Columban classmate and close friend, Fr Michael Mohally from the city of Cork, Ireland, wrote the article below for the September-October 2003 issue of MISYON, the Columban magazine in the Philippines of which I have been editor for 14 years now. We have re-published it in the current September-October issue of the magazine, now known as MISYONonline.com. Fr Michael is based in Manila.


Towards the end of his homily at the canonisation Mass Pope Francis made an off-the-cuff comment about what we should call the new saint and figured that everyone would still refer to her as' Mother Teresa'. Very few Catholics would know who St Pius of Pietrelcina is but they would know who 'Padre Pio' is. And in Chile San Alberto Hurtado SJ is still known to everyone as 'Padre Hurtado'.

Incidentally, Mother Teresa and Padre Hurtado spent some time in Rathfarnham, now a suburb of Dublin, within a few years of each other. Mother Teresa had her initial formation as a Loreto Sister in Loreto Abbey there in the late 1920s. 

Padre Hurtado lived in nearby Rathfarnham Castle, where the Jesuits had a retreat house, for some time in the early 1930s studying English.
Full post here.

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