Cardinal Parolin: ‘St. Teresa shows that love has to
hurt’
(Vatican Radio)
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, celebrated the Mass of
Thanksgiving on Monday for the canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
In his homily for the Mass in
St. Peter’s Square, Cardinal Parolin recalled several key moments of her life
and the thirst for God which drove her every action.
‘Caritas Christi urget nos:
the love of Christ compels us’ was the recurring theme of Cardinal Pietro
Parolin’s homily for the Thanksgiving Mass.
These words, he said, summed
up the flame of love which compelled the now-St. Teresa of Calcutta during her
life and which compel us to follow her example.
Cardinal Parolin revisited
several of the key events of Mother Teresa’s life, including her self-definition
as ‘a little pencil in God’s hands’.
‘Mother Teresa,’ he said,
‘was a clear mirror of the love of God and an admirable example of service to
our neighbor, especially to the poorest, most derelict, and most abandoned of
people.’
He also recalled her constant
fight for the rights of the unborn, which he said grew out of her recognition
that the worst form of poverty is ‘to feel unloved, unwanted, scorned’.
He said, ‘This recognition
brought her to identify unborn children whose very existence is threatened as
the “poorest of the poor”. Each of them depends, more than any other human
being, on the love and care of the mother and on the protection of society.’
Cardinal Parolin went on the
recall Mother Teresa’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1979, in which
she said, ‘It is very important to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt.
It hurt Jesus to love us, it hurt him.’
He said these words ‘are like
a doorway through which we enter into the abyss, which surrounded the life of
the Saint.’
Cardinal Parolin concluded
his homily remembering the two simple words she had posted in every house of
the Missionaries of Charity: ‘I thirst’.
‘I thirst,’ he said, ‘a
thirst for fresh, clean water, a thirst for souls to console and to redeem from
their ugliness to make them beautiful and pleasing in the eyes of God, a thirst
for God, for His vital and luminous presence. I thirst; this is the thirst
which burned in Mother Teresa: her cross and exaltation, her torment and her
glory.’
'St. Teresa of Calcutta, pray
for us!'
(Devin Sean Watkins)
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