After their meeting, with the help of friends, he was able to travel to Calcutta for more encounters with the beloved caretaker of the poor.
A man lies curled up on a plastic tarp and dirty bedsheet on a Calcutta sidewalk.
These pavement dwellers on Sudder Street have made a makeshift home out of straw mats, tarps, and a few wooden poles. (October 2018)
This poverty-stricken man, walking near New Market in Calcutta, is gathering recyclable items in canvas bags to earn a few rupees. (December 2015)
Nearby travelers began touching her feet and putting the dust on their foreheads.
“I thought you wanted me,” he said.
“Yes, but I want my things, too.”
Mother Teresa was referring to boxes of supplies she hoped would come with him from New York City, but Father Curlin had not known that British Air would fly the supplies free of charge. His point of departure had been from Washington, DC.
Father Curlin ran into some trouble getting through passport control. He did not have a visa and did not know he was supposed to have one. “On the plane or to jail,” said the official. Mother Teresa told the official that Father Curlin would not go to jail, and she even threatened to call Mrs. Gandhi. Father Curlin and Mother sat on two plastic chairs waiting for the official to decide. While they waited, she joked with him: “Thank you for allowing me to have one of your great works of mercy.”
“Which one?”
“To visit the prisoners in jail,” referring to Father Curlin’s close encounter with going to jail that day.
While they continued to wait, nearby travelers began touching her feet and putting the dust on their foreheads. She would pat their heads and hand them miraculous medals. Finally, they made it out of the airport and into the famous beat-up ambulance that served as Mother Teresa’s main form of transportation in Calcutta in the early years. People were banging at the window of the ambulance, and Mother Teresa advised Father Curlin against donating money, or he would not make it down the street.
That first night, a sister walked Father Curlin down a dirty alley flanked by trenches. A man was urinating in one, while another man washed pots and pans in the same water. The concerned Father Curlin told the sister that many diseases would be incurred by this kind of misuse of the water supplies. She led him to a four-floor concrete building where he would be sleeping. He slept on a hard, wooden bed with a mosquito net to prevent infectious mosquito bites.
Father Curlin did not sleep his first night because of the pounding of hammers on walls. This is fairly typical in India, which is a country that never sleeps. There is always some kind of outdoor noise, whether it be people chatting outside a window, music blaring, or
Woman in one of the poorest slums of Calcutta, near Titagarh. She is sifting through plastics to find recyclables as income for her family. (June 2008)
A row of blind Muslim beggars waits on a Calcutta street corner for alms from passers-by. (October 2018)
A woman washes dishes from a municipal tap filled with buckets of water. This is a common sight throughout the city. (October 2018)
She never viewed anyone as above or below herself, and she teaches us that we are all equal in God’s eyes.
The bishop also told me about the moment during that visit when Mother Teresa invited him into her office area. “Would you like to see Jesus?” she asked him. Caught by surprise, at first he thought she meant that Jesus was physically present in the room. Instead, she took him out on the streets of Calcutta, where they came upon a dying man lying in the gutter. She picked him up in her arms and said, “This is Jesus.”
Bishop Curlin would later collaborate on several projects with Mother Teresa, including founding the Gift of Peace convent and home for AIDS patients in 1986. His work with Mother Teresa was always about seeing Jesus in the distressing disguise of the poor. It was evident to me at the beatification that the humble Bishop Curlin was the ideal priest to assist me in understanding Mother Teresa’s calling.
Mother Teresa viewed herself as an instrument in God’s hands, and her work as his. Motherhood calls each of us to be attentive to the spiritual and physical well-being of those in our care. Mother Teresa introduced Bishop Curlin to the poor of Calcutta on the very streets where her apostolate began, where she saw the suffering Jesus. She never viewed anyone as above or below herself, and she teaches us that we are all equal in God’s eyes. When we view the world through his eyes, we are united in one purpose and in service of one community.
The look of “Mother.” This was one of the author’s rare opportunities to photograph Mother Teresa when they met privately at the Mother House in Calcutta. the sounds of horns and construction. The following morning, Mother Teresa showed her concern for the exhausted priest. “I made a mistake,” she said. “They make steel lamps next door.” He was then moved to a quieter facility. Mother Teresa’s concern for his comfort was an ordinary, motherly response.
A grotto with Our Lady encased in glass overlooks St. John’s cemetery, where the deceased Missionaries of Charity sisters are buried.
II.
Hugh Markey
Hugh A. Markey was a robust New Yorker, a wealthy international businessman who provided millions of miraculous medals to Mother Teresa and her sisters, the same medals she kissed and offered as gifts to volunteers. As a longtime volunteer for the Missionaries of Charity and other Catholic charities in New York City, Markey would often serve as Mother’s driver on her visits to the city. Mother Teresa nicknamed him “Uncle Hugo.”
In his funeral homily for Uncle Hugo on September 28, 2015, his beloved friend Father James McCurry recalled how Mother Teresa told Markey, “The MCs have one Mother — I’m the ‘Mother’; we have fathers, the ‘MC Fathers’ [priests]; we have sisters; and we have brothers; but we don’t have any uncle — So YOU can be our uncle: ‘UNCLE HUGO!’” Mother Teresa’s successor, Sister Nirmala, gave Markey a written document attesting that he was indeed the only “Uncle” in the Missionaries of Charity. He even had a “habit” of sorts to match theirs — a white golf shirt with a blue-bordered collar.
I met Uncle Hugo on the flight back from Mother Teresa’s beatification, and he struck me as a very unlikely devotee of Mother Teresa. He was a large and loud-spoken man, the kind one might find at a baseball game cheering on his favorite team, not the sort of man one expected to see driving Missionaries of Charity around New York City in his Lexus.
When he asked
