'I am Mother Theresa's miracle'
October 20, 2003 Edition -1
Beth Duff-Brown
Monica Besra says she is living proof that Mother Teresa performed a miracle from heaven and deserves to become a saint.
Millions of other Hindus and Christians in the slums of this eastern capital would argue the tiny Roman Catholic nun was a living saint among the poorest of India's poor and deserves eternal veneration for that alone.
Yet, as Pope John Paul II beatified the woman known simply as "Mother" to many in her care, doctors who treated Besra insist the illiterate villager was cured of her illness by medicine - not a miracle. They're concerned that belief in such events will turn the poor away from science when they are ill.
Besra (35) is amazed that anyone could fail to see Mother Teresa's healing abilities.
"God chose me as the medium for people to see Mother Teresa's enormous power to cure, not only with her physical cures, but through her miracles," Besra said before she left for Rome to attend yesterday's ceremony that will elevate the nun to the status next to sainthood.
Last year, John Paul approved a miracle credited to her intercession - Besra's cure - which reportedly took place on the first anniversary of Mother Teresa's death. A second miracle is needed to make her a saint.
Besra, a tribal woman from the village of Nakor, 450km north of Calcutta, said in an interview that the miracle which saved her life began with a vision.
The reports of Besra's illness vary, and she herself claims not to really understand what ailed her. Some doctors said she had a large malignant tumour in her abdomen; others diagnosed tubercular meningitis.
She was put on four anti-TB drugs, said Dr Ranjan Mustafi, the chief gynaecologist who treated Besra at Balurghat District Hospital.
Unable to care for herself, and too poor to remain at the state hospital, Besra said her family took her to the Missionaries of Charity hospice in Patiram, a town on the outskirts of Balurghat.
At about 7am on September 5 1998 - the first anniversary of Mother Teresa's death - the sisters told Besra that, though she was Hindu, the day was particularly holy and she might want to pray with them in their chapel.
"When I went in for the prayers and looked at a photograph of Mother Teresa, I saw rays of light coming from her eyes and I felt very light and dizzy," said Besra, who spoke with passionate certitude, despite telling the story hundreds of times to Vatican investigators and sceptical doctors and journalists.
"I started shaking and my heart was beating very fast. I felt scared as I didn't know what was happening to me."
Besra said the sisters helped her back to bed and told her to pray. At 5pm, she watched as they lifted her sari, put a small medallion of Mother Mary on the large lump in her right abdomen, and told her to pray.
"At 1 am the next morning, I awoke with a start and suddenly felt so light," said Besra, whose family has since converted to Catholicism. "I was so excited, I woke up the woman in the bed next to me, Simira, and told her, 'Look, it's gone!' "
The Rev Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian postulator (chief advocate) for the case, said the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints interviewed 113 people and gathered 35 000 pages of documentation attesting to the virtues of Mother Teresa.
They also got testimony from Mother Teresa's detractors, including author Christopher Hitchens, who condemns the nun for taking donations from shady people - such as disgraced American financier Charles Keating - while doing little to modernise her grimy, dark hospices for the poor.
Kolodiejchuk said the claims were investigated and "Mother Teresa was not found to be without virtue in these cases".
Mustafi agreed Mother Teresa was full of virtue, but said she didn't perform any miracles. He said Besra was on anti-TB drugs for nine months and they dissolved the tumour.
Kolodiejchuk said five doctors in Rome were asked their medical opinion about Besra. "The unanimous opinion of the doctors here was that there was no medical explanation for it."
Meanwhile, members of the Science and Rationalists' Association of India, whose mission is to expose charlatans and gurus offering miracle cures and meditations, are also upset.
"Look, Coca-Cola promotes their business and that's what Sister Nirmala is doing. Sister Nirmala is a good businessman, nothing more," said Prabir Ghose, general secretary of the group, referring to the Catholic nun who now heads the Missionaries of Charity.
Sister Christie, a nun at Mother House, headquarters for the Missionaries of Charity, shrugs and smiles serenely at such skepticism.
"For those who believe, no proof is necessary; for those who don't believe, no proof is enough." - Sapa-AP
A life dedicated selflessly to others
Vatican City - Mother Teresa dedicated her life to caring for those who nobody else was prepared to look after.
She became synonymous with the people she called "the poorest of the poor" in the slums of Calcutta over more than four decades of a life devoted to others.
Her work would win her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, as well as trenchant criticism in some quarters over her dealings with some of her wealthy benefactors.
When she accepted the Nobel prize, she said she did so "in the name of all those people that have become a burden to society and are shunned by everyone".
Her occasional critics felt she, in turn, should have shunned the notoriously unsavoury Haitian ruler Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, as well as the disgraced British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, both of whom donated generously to her cause.
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born to Albanian parents in what is now Macedonia on August 27 1910.
At the age of 18, she joined the Irish order, the Sisters of Loreto, beginning life as a teaching nun.
But her life changed in 1948 when she came across a woman dying in front of a Calcutta hospital. She then chose to work in the city's slums, in time becoming known to a curious media as the "Saint of the Gutters".
She opened her first House for the Dying in 1952. Here, her new Missionaries of Charity, identifiable by their distinct blue and white saris, became a fixture.
In 1963, she received the Padmashri, or Lord of the Lotus, prize for her services to the people of India, and in 1971, Pope Paul VI awarded her the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize. Six months before her death in 1997, she handed over the running of her order to Sister Nirmala, who was at the beatication ceremony in St Peter's Square yesterday.
Pope John Paul II, one of her greatest admirers, set her on a fast-track to sainthood.
Last year, the Vatican recognised the healing of a Hindu woman, Monica Besra, as a miracle after she had invoked the nun's intercession. A second miracle has to verified before she can be proclaimed a saint. - Sapa-AFP
