‘Saint of the Gutters’ : Amid Opulence in New York, Mother Teresa Is a Reminder of the Most Downtrodden

Under glittering chandeliers, an elite throng in sequined gowns and white dinner jackets filled the ballroom, the podium brimming with regally robed cardinals and archbishops.

Into that scene of magisterial affluence at the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Times Square, a tiny, slightly stooped old woman from the haunts of the wretched was led to the dais.

As if proclaiming the approach of a reigning monarch or President, the presiding officer boomed out, “Mother Teresa of Calcutta!”

The elegant crowd rose to its feet in a tide of sustained, admiring applause.

Mother Teresa, 81, a cotton veil rimming her wrinkled face, told the imposing gathering of the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus about sheltering a dying derelict crawling with worms.

“It took three hours to pick from his body all the worms,” she said in mellow tones. She said the emaciated man murmured gratefully that he had lived like “an animal” but now could die “like an angel.”

He died with a joyful heart because he had received “tender love and care,” she said. “God was with him. . . . We must thank God for the beautiful way in which we sense God in the poorest of the poor.”

Her recent appearance offered a striking contrast--the mighty and well-off of American Roman Catholicism in formal finery, seated at rose-bedecked tables, paying homage to this humble, aged toiler among the destitute.

She and several accompanying members of her worldwide order, the Missionaries of Charity, clad in blue-trimmed cotton saris of India, declined to stay for the lavish dinner that evening.

They slipped away beforehand. She insists that any dinner honoring her should go to feed the hungry.

As a result, the presiding supreme knight, Virgil C. Duchant of New Haven, Conn., said the organization had agreed to give her order an amount matching the dinner costs--about $100,000.

That was in addition to the organization’s presenting her its $100,000 Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope) Award for serving Christ and humanity.

Several years ago, she turned down the Knights when they offered annual, permanent support. She believes that her work must always depend on God to provide for it.

A fiscal guarantee from the Knights, she apparently felt, would somehow undermine her efforts because her order would not be as reliant on God for sustenance.

“Give God permission,” she said.

It is an unusual rationale in this materialistic world. “The saint of the gutters,” she is called.

Simple, selfless, soft-spoken, physically frail, she nonetheless has some magnetic charisma that has enabled her to enlist nearly 4,000 members in 102 countries, including impoverished communities in the United States.

Her order runs 468 homes for the poor, sick and dying. She started it in 1950 in the squalor of Calcutta, India, her home base. She was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1972 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977.

The crucified Jesus, she maintains, is present and seen in faces of the stricken and weak.

She noted that he said in Scripture, “Whatever you do to the least of these”--the hungry, homeless, imprisoned, sick--”you do it to me,” and that people would be judged on that basis in the hereafter.

How beautiful, she said, “to be 24 hours every day with Jesus in the poorest of the poor”--the unfed, unwanted, abandoned, crippled and dying.

Wherever she went on her visit here--to one of her order’s homes in slums of the South Bronx, to worship at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and elsewhere--people trailed her, extolling her, reaching to touch her.

The incidents, as recounted by New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor, resembled episodes in the New Testament when crowds flocked behind Jesus, feeling that just to touch his garment would strengthen them.

Mother Teresa has suffered severe illnesses, including heart attacks in 1983 and 1989. She was hospitalized briefly in February. In 1990, she resigned from her position with her order. The Pope agreed to it. But her nuns promptly reelected her superior general.

Over the years, Mother Teresa has occasionally consented to leave her abode with the indigent, meeting with queens, presidents and the Pope. The encounters always reflect the great contrast between their realm and hers.

It was that way in the meeting with the Knights of Columbus, whom she thanked for their charities. But before she left for a waiting car, she urged:

“Pray also for the people who have suffered so much, not because they are hungry for bread but because they are hungry for love.”