Pope Francis honors people who care for ‘poorest of the poor’ on his 86th birthday

Mother Teresa in the year 1980. / L’Osservatore Romano.

Rome Newsroom, Sep 5, 2022 / 06:40 am (CNA).

The so-called “definitive movie” about Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be in theaters in October. It sheds new light on — and delivers powerful images of — the life of this venerated Albanian-Kosovar nun.

Sept. 5 is the feast day of the St. Teresa of Kolkata. She died on Sept. 5, 1997, and was beatified only six years later, on Oct. 19, 2003.

John Paul II proclaimed her blessed in 2003, only six years after her death. Her life inspired thousands of books. Her life, witness, and legacy have been studied and written about in depth.

Pope Francis canonized Mother Teresa on Sept. 4, 2016. 

For this reason, it doesn’t seem easy to add anything to the many biographies and stories about Mother Teresa of Calcutta. But the film “No Greater Love”, produced by the Knights of Columbus, achieves this feat. 

The film premiere took place in Rome on Aug. 29, while on Aug. 31, there was a press conference about the movie. 

Divided into chapters that tell the salient moments of Mother Teresa’s life, the film is fragmented with interviews with missionaries, members of the order she founded, and biographers of Mother Teresa. 

“Mother Teresa” is not only a reflection on the life of the saint but also gives a general perspective of the great work that the Missionaries of Charity founded by Mother Teresa do all over the world, in Brazil, in the fields on the border between Mexico and the United States, in the Philippines.

The story of Mother Teresa is well-documented. Born in Skopje to an Albanian-Kosovar family, a minority of the minorities in the Balkan region, she soon felt the missionary impulse, entered the Missionary Nuns of Our Lady of Loreto, and left for India, where she began to work as a teacher. 

After witnessing the shocking impact of local suffering in the streets of Calcutta after some riots, she realized her mission was, first and foremost, to be with the poor. 

Indeed, with the poorest of the poor.

From this vocation was born a work that has touched the entire world. It spread from the slums of Calcutta (Kolkata) to the Bronx, helping those stricken with another kind of poverty: marginalized AIDS patients, who, at the end of the previous century, was at first treated like lepers at the time of Jesus.

Eventually, her vital work was recognized by the world. In 1979, Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize, and in Oslo, she delivered a touching speech in which she labeled the nations that legalize abortion as “the poorest nations.” 

Mother Teresa’s friendship with Saint John Paul II bore many fruits, including a house of the Missionaries of Charity right in the Vatican, where they are today. 

Part of this saint’s enduring legacy is her spirituality, her struggle with the “dark night of the soul.” 

What is powerful in the film is, above all, the images. The producers had full access to the Missionaries of Charity’s archive, finding unpublished or little-known footage, including that of Mother Teresa acting as an extraordinary minister of the Eucharist.

Patrick Kelly, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, emphasized that the film was born “thanks to the relationship of trust between the Knights of Columbus and the Missionaries of Charity.”

After all, Virgil Dechant, the predecessor of Kelly’s predecessor as Supreme Knight, was a personal friend of Mother Teresa. They collaborated, sharing the mutual value of charity, at the foundations of the Knight of Columbus, considering that “charity is the fundamental principle of the Knights of Columbus.”

In a letter sent to Kelly, Pope Francis thanked for initiatives that “help, in a creative way, to make zeal for evangelization accessible especially to the younger generations.”

Cardinal Sean O’Malley, archbishop of Boston, talked about his friendship with Mother Teresa. Although he asked her to send nuns to his diocese on two different occasions “to bring healing and consolation,” Mother Teresa always fulfilled the requests.

Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator of the cause of the canonization of Mother Teresa, stressed that the film helps to remember the great work and vocation of the saint. 

The movie’s message is that “Calcutta is everywhere” — because there are those in need everywhere: “There is a work of charity yet to be done.”

Sister Myriam Therese, regional superior of the Missionaries of Charity, said it was “nice to see people who changed their lives because they were affected by God’s love” and that Mother Teresa was “a carrier of that love.”

Finally, David Naglieri, the movie’s director, underlined that “they did not want only a biography, we wanted to show her radical call, but also to show how the mission of Mother Teresa continues.”

[…]

Archbishop Tarcisius Isao Kikuchi of Tokyo was elected president of Caritas Internationalis during the Vatican-based confederation of national charities’ General Assembly on May 11-16, 2023. / Courtesy of Caritas Internationalis

Rome Newsroom, May 15, 2023 / 10:45 am (CNA).

Archbishop Tarcisius Isao Kikuchi has been elected as the new president of Caritas Internationalis, the second-largest humanitarian aid organization in the world after the Red Cross.

The Catholic archbishop of Tokyo was Japan’s first missionary priest in Africa, where he first volunteered at a Caritas refugee camp, the start of 30 years of service with the Catholic charitable organization.

More than 400 delegates taking part in Caritas Internationalis’ 22nd General Assembly in Rome May 11-16 elected Kikuchi to serve a four-year term. The body must still elect a secretary general.

“Caritas must be on the front lines to welcome, accompany, serve and defend the poor and vulnerable,” Kikuchi, 64, said in his speech to the assembly.

“This mission must be sustained and be the focus of the members of the Confederation, and I would like to be the one, together with the secretary general, to lead the entire organization to fulfill this important mission of the Church. We are all invited to walk together.”

As president of Caritas Internationalis, Kikuchi will lead a confederation of more than 160 Catholic charities operating in 200 countries and territories. He succeeds Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, who has served as Caritas’ president since 2019.

Japan’s first missionary priest in Africa

After he was ordained a priest in 1986 with the Society of the Divine Word, also known as the Divine Word Missionaries, Kikuchi was sent to serve as a missionary priest in rural Ghana for eight years. 

“I was sent to a ‘bush’ parish, deep in the bush, without electricity, without water. … And that was really an important experience for me and that helped create my identity, I suppose,” Kikuchi said in an interview with Vatican Radio on May 14.

He witnessed extreme poverty with “many people … dying without proper medication” and the spread of HIV-AIDS, but he was struck by how people supported each other and how that created hope.

After his work in Ghana, Kikuchi returned to Africa in 1995 as a Caritas volunteer at a refugee camp in Bukavu, Zaire, which took in hundreds of thousands of refugees during the Rwandan genocide.

Kikuchi recalls that the Rwandan refugees “had no food, no clothing, no shelter, and people were in need of everything.”

He said: “The second time I went to the camp, I met some of the leaders and asked them what they needed. And I was expecting the leader to tell me that ‘we need food, we need education, we need medication, we need shelter’ — or something like that. … But rather than that, he said, ‘Father, you come from Japan. So, when you go back to Japan, tell them that we are still here: We are all forgotten.’ And that really shocked me.”

“After that experience, I met so many people in different areas, in different countries struck by disaster, or people in war-torn or conflict areas. I heard the same story and the same cry again and again, that ‘we are forgotten; we are forgotten’. So, this is the real mission of Caritas: to help people know they are not forgotten. We want to be with them.”

Kikuchi became the executive director of Caritas Japan in 1999 and was appointed as a bishop by John Paul II in 2004. 

He went on to serve as the president of Caritas Japan from 2007 to 2022, also participating as a member of the Caritas Internationalis Executive Committee from 1999 to 2004 and leading Caritas Asia as its president from 2011 to 2019.

Pope Francis appointed Kikuchi as archbishop of Tokyo in 2017 and he currently serves as the president of the Japanese bishops’ conference and the secretary general of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences.

Pope’s reform of Caritas

The Japanese archbishop takes the helm of the Church’s charitable arm as it is going through a critical period of reform, six months after Pope Francis dismissed its top leaders.

Pope Francis issued a decree in November that removed the organization’s administration and stated that Caritas would undergo a review “to improve its management rules and procedures — even if financial matters were managed well and fundraising objectives regularly achieved — and thereby better serve its member charities around the world.”

A press release issued at the time said there was no finding of any misappropriation of funds or sexual abuse but cited deficiencies in Caritas’ “management and procedures, seriously prejudicing team spirit and staff morale.”

A provisional administration, led by a former Bain Capital management expert, has run the global organization ever since.

“It is not only that we are an NGO, but we are much more than that. We are a Catholic Church organization, and the institute of the service of the Church,” Kikuchi said.

“So, that means that Caritas is supposed to be a witness of the love of God. What we do is not only provide food or materials or any kind of assistance, but rather we want to be witnesses of the love of God to show people that this is how God loves all people.”

[…]

Emma Larson, who became Catholic after hearing a perfomance of the Ave Maria, at Holy Rosary Cathedral in Vancouver. Credit: The B.C. Catholic.

Vancouver, Canada, May 20, 2021 / 19:01 pm (CNA).
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