Diocese to celebrate soon-to-be St. Teresa of Calcutta with Mass

Faithful from throughout the Diocese are invited to join Bishop David M. O’Connell, C.M., for a Mass of Thanksgiving to commemorate the canonization of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta Sept. 4 at 11 a.m. in Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, a worship site of Mother of Mercy Parish, Asbury Park.

Bishop O’Connell will be principal celebrant and homilist of the Mass and all are invited to attend. Expected to be present in the congregation are the Missionaries of Charity who serve in Asbury Park. Blessed Teresa was the founder of the Missionaries of Charity, a religious order community whose members devote their lives and ministries to serving the poor.

Blessed Teresa will be elevated to sainthood earlier that day by Pope Francis during a Mass at the Vatican in Rome. The canonization date was announced months after the Holy Father approved a second miracle for Blessed Teresa, who was known as the “Saint of the Gutters” and a Nobel Prize recipient, recognizing her for her work among the poorest of the poor including the impoverished and dying in Kolkata, India.

The canonization Mass will be televised on Eternal Word Television Network Sept. 4 starting at 3:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time and will be repeated at 11:30 a.m., 10 p.m., and at midnight Sept. 5.

Blessed Teresa, who was born Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhu Aug. 26, 1910, in Skopje (present day Macedonia), founded the Missionary of Charity Sisters, an order that was officially erected for the Archdiocese of Calcutta, India, Oct. 7, 1950. She died Sept. 5, 1997, in Kolkata, India, and was beatified on World Mission Sunday, Oct. 19, 2003, by Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.

The Missionaries of Charity have served in the Diocese of Trenton since 1999 when they responded to an invitation from Bishop John C. Reiss to begin their ministry working among the poor in Asbury Park.

Four years earlier on June 18, 1995, then Mother Teresa had visited the Diocese and attended Mass celebrated by Bishop Reiss in St. Mary of the Assumption Cathedral, Trenton.  During the Mass and before a congregation of some 10,000 people who filled the cathedral proper, the dining hall located in the cathedral undercroft, where the Mass was televised, and the surrounding streets where the Mass was broadcast via loudspeakers, Bishop Reiss presented a formal letter to Mother Teresa “formally and canonically” inviting the Missionaries of Charity to establish a residence in the Diocese.

Today, there are five Missionaries of Charity who now reside in the Asbury Park convent and their work includes visiting area nursing homes including in the towns of Neptune and Bradley Beach, teaching religious education in Mother of Mercy Parish (which was created from a merger of three Asbury Park parishes — Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Holy Spirit and St. Peter Claver, and Neptune’s Our Lady of Providence).