Mother Teresa’s confessor recalls her ‘love without limits’

August 26, 2010

A century after Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’s birth, an Austrian priest who served as her confessor recalled her “love without limits.”

“She was a missionary of love without limits,” Msgr. Leo Maasburg recalled. “Her love was limitless in its geographic scope, like the apostles sent by the Lord and it was limitless in its spiritual depth, according to the unique new commandment of Jesus to ‘love one another as I have loved you.’ Mother Teresa lived this command of Jesus in a remarkably genuine and complete manner, making the light of Christ shine wherever she was present. Through her being and action, she has shown the world what the mission means today: not preaching love only with words, but also with one's way of life.”

Msgr. Maasburg added:

When Mother Teresa sent her nuns to the dictatorial regime in Ethiopia, someone posed the delicate question of how she hoped to carry out the mission. Her answer was: "The tender love and care that we will dedicate to the poorest of the poor in your country will show God's love for them."

“Whatever she did was ‘His work,’” the priest continued. “She never considered any of her works as her own. She was ‘the pencil in the hand of God, in the hands of a God who was writing a love letter to the world.’ Her docility led her into new, unknown mystical and spiritual depths. In the revelation of His thirst, of His need for love (‘I thirst’ - John 19:28), Jesus asked for her consent to His plan.” “The path into spiritual depths, for Mother Teresa, took an unexpected and dramatic course. In a ‘night of the soul’ that lasted for decades, Jesus made her participate in a mystical - yet very real - way in His own suffering and the abandonment of God on the Cross (‘My God why have you forsaken me’ - Mark 15:34). While the new order she founded spread all over the world, through a sense of separation from God experienced with great distress, she experienced the pain of thirst for love, a love that she did not feel was responded to.”

“She realized that the place where Jesus' thirst for love can be quenched, is in the hungry, thirsty, naked, and forgotten - in a word: "Jesus under the disguise of the poorest of the poor," in the slums of the world and in the spiritual slums inside people's hearts,” Msgr. Maasburg added. “Thus, she became a Missionary of Charity, with a social commitment that was without limits and that contained an incomparable spiritual depth.”

 

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Further information:

• “Mother Teresa was a missionary of love without limits,” recalls Msgr. Leo M. Maasburg on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mother Teresa of Calcutta (Fides)