Several years ago, a well-to-do family wanted to donate their swanky house in San Francisco to a worthy cause. After many weeks of research and discussion, they decided to contact the Missionaries of Charity. They asked if Mother Teresa would be willing to establish a community of her nuns at this cold-in-the-summer location in California? She said yes as long as they could also procure a storefront property close by to serve as a food and clothing distribution center for the poor. What happened next brought church and state together in a way that Thomas Jefferson could never have imagined.

The family’s lawyers had no trouble deeding the domestic property to the sisters. Luckily they also found an abandoned commercial store just two blocks away from the residence. However, they were having difficulty obtaining the city’s permit to allow the sisters to reopen this old store as a food pantry.

Oddly enough, Mother Teresa, who was always present at the inauguration of a new location for her order, was unable to visit the residence and pantry ahead of time. In fact, the group of sisters she appointed to begin this new community were already living in the house for six months prior to Mother Teresa’s first arrival. Incidentally, they had already gathered several bags of clothing and boxes of canned goods for the poor. Unfortunately, the certification from the city never arrived, so the clothes and foodstuffs had to be kept in the basement of the sisters’ home.

Then Mother Teresa arrived. Sister Marta and Sister Maria took the aging, saintly superior on the cook’s tour of their latest foundation.

“What is this?” the Albanian founder protested as she stepped onto the plush rug in the foyer. “Oh, that’s called wall-to-wall carpeting,” explained Sister Maria.

Mother Teresa: “Rip it out. I don’t want any of my sisters to get soft.”

In the kitchen, Sister Marta demonstrated how well the refrigerator-freezer could store weeks of frozen meals and dispense ice cubes without opening the door.

Mother Teresa: “Get rid of it. You may have a very small refrigerator to store a jug of milk and a few sandwiches in case a poor person comes to the door. Otherwise we beg for our meals each day as the poor are required to do.”

Downstairs in the basement, Sister Maria showed Mother Teresa how the boiler provided warmth throughout the building with an easy turn of a thermostat. She also pointed to the rows and rows of storage boxes filled with secondhand clothes and canned goods waiting to be transported to their still-closed storefront.

“Turn off the boiler, permanently,” Mother Teresa ordered briskly, “and tell me why all these boxes of clothes and food have been sitting here in the basement.”

Sister Marta tried to explain. “You see, Mother, the city must issue a certificate before the doors of the food pantry can be opened and the food and clothes distributed.”

Mother Teresa: “Are you telling me that you’re letting a piece of paper stand between this food and hungry souls?” Without waiting for a reply she added, “Get all the sisters down here to pick up a box, and we will bring these donations to the poor immediately.”

Rather miraculously, the necessary certification license arrived that very afternoon. Apparently the tall fellows at city hall were not about to tangle with a 4-foot-11 Catholic nun!

Today the Missionaries of Charity number 5,123 sisters living in 758 communities serving 139 countries. Each year, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St. Teresa of Kolkata on September 5, the day that Mother Teresa died in 1997. She was 87 years old.

Holy Homework: Let’s offer a simple sacrifice, like a meal of abstinence or fasting perhaps, in gratitude to God for the inspiration we receive from the Missionaries of Charity sisters, brothers, and priests. Let’s also meditate not only the three traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience which they profess, but also their fourth vow “to give wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor.”

St. Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us.

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