EXCLUSIVE | PHOTOS: Living Mother Teresa’s Legacy: Missionaries of Charity Offer Hope and Healing to the Forgotten in Denver
- André Escaleira, Jr.
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
These small but mighty sisters show Christ’s face to the Mile High City’s most vulnerable.
Rain or shine, blizzard or heat wave, you’ll find them making their way through the city of Denver. They’ve got a mission, and they’re going to see it through.
These not-so-secret agents stand at about five feet tall. They might be easy to overlook, were it not for their distinctive garb. After all, it’s not every day you see a sari in Denver.
But when you do see these missionaries of mercy — Mother Teresa’s own Missionaries of Charity — making their way into the muck, seeking out the poorest of the poor and charging unafraid into places most of us would never want to be seen in, you can’t help but see Jesus.
“Not by words, but by their action,” said Tom, a Lay Missionary of Charity who’s been connected with the sisters at St. Joseph Parish in Denver for decades. “You spend some time with them and you start to realize there is Christ in them. They’re not saying the words; they’re doing the things that show Christ. And that’s just so powerful. Four little ladies here at St. Joseph’s are the most powerful women I’ve probably ever met.”
As they pursue the poorest of the poor, the sisters and those who minister with them live out the very prayer they pray after each Mass — that they might radiate Christ, first and foremost by loving every single person he places in front of them.
“All they’re doing is providing love and care for each individual person and making them feel important,” said Jacquie, another Lay Missionary of Charity. “They just love them and let Jesus do the work in opening that door. It is nothing but a selfless service that they give. They’re just there, making them feel like a human being.”
“We’re here to actually bring Jesus to them and to help them to know that Jesus loves them,” added Sr. Andrew, one of three Missionaries of Charity in the Denver community. “Somebody is coming in Jesus’ name. We represent God, and that God loves them, God cares for them, and he’s concerned about them. Hopefully, they can come closer to him and realize ‘God really loves me; he cares for me.’”
In short, Sr. Andrew said, their whole mission is “about bringing them to Jesus and bringing Jesus to them, because Jesus isn’t walking on this earth anymore as he used to, so we have to bring Jesus to them.”
For one of the female guests at the Missionaries of Charity shelter who spoke on the condition of anonymity, being loved and served by the sisters has been nothing short of transformative.
Having arrived in Denver from Atlanta to help with a family emergency, things took a turn. Despite her impressive qualifications and experience, she struggled to find work and found herself with nowhere to go, no friends nearby and no job to afford a place. As she called around, searching for a place to spend the night, she found the Missionaries of Charity.
“They were so happy when I called,” she remembered.
After just a week of staying with the sisters, this guest’s heart began to burst at the seams. She’d left the church 25 years prior, not finding the answers she desperately sought.
“When I came here and when they opened the door to me, it was like they moved a lot of things within me. I’ve come back to the Church again,” she shared. “It’s emotional to come back again.”
With the encouragement and support of the sisters, this guest went to Confession for the first time in decades and began receiving the Eucharist anew. She has been so impacted by their witness that, once she leaves the shelter, she plans to continue returning to help the sisters with their service to others.
“They’re amazing people, and I love the commitment they have with the people,” she said. “Everything they do, they really do with heart.”
(Photos by André Escaleira, Jr.)
A beautiful mission, it’s not without its challenges.
In addition to the standard vows of poverty, chastity and obedience that all religious men and women make, the Missionaries of Charity make a fourth vow: wholehearted and free service to the poor. Their radical living of the vow of poverty means they decline most comforts you and I enjoy: they very rarely eat in restaurants; they see family once in a blue moon; they are reassigned regularly; and they only carry absolute necessities.
But beyond the material, logistical and practical, they live a deep spiritual challenge: to love the poor so deeply that they suffer and grieve alongside them.
As we headed out early on a Saturday morning to serve the poorest of the poor, Sr. Andrew noted that most of her “friends” were nowhere to be found. They might have been moved along by police or government officials; they might have received housing; they may have been admitted to the hospital or rehab for medical treatment; they may have reunited with family or friends. There was just no way to know.
“I feel sadness,” Sr. Andrew shared as we stood in a park where the Missionaries usually serve and encounter their friends, today with no one in sight, “because our friends aren’t here anymore, and something might have happened to them. Hopefully, it’s good, but then there’s always this sense that maybe something negative happened to them.”
With a hand raised to her brow to shield her eyes from the sun, Sr. Andrew searched the park, the street and the surrounding area for minutes, her concern as evident as her brow was furrowed.
“You wonder where they went, you know. Is it a safe place? Are they okay?” Sr. Andrew said.
Loving our neighbor is a tall order, especially when our neighbor is living a difficult life: one that is uncertain, unsafe and unpredictable. Many of the individuals the Missionaries of Charity encounter have seen better days; they’re down on their luck. They might be angry; they might yell, scream and berate.
“When we do a service for God, it’s like, ‘This is for you, Lord. This is your people. You love them.’ Even the person that might yell and scream at us, you love that person,” Sr. Andrew explained. “Why should I get upset? Why should I think, ‘I’m not going to be around this person anymore’? No, God loves them just as much as he loves me — or maybe even more.”
Even still, these missionaries of mercy, these personifications of Christ, make their way through the bowels of the city to seek out the lost all for “the salvation and sanctification of each person that we touch by our services, each person that we meet,” Sr. Andrew said. And all with a spirit of joy that flows from their relationship with God.
“It’s not just to give them food and make them happy that they have something to eat; it’s to help them realize that God loves them and wants them with him in Heaven one day. That’s the reason why we do this,” she continued, noting that anything else would be social work.
As noble a profession as that may be, these women have a deeper call: to help Jesus save souls. That call necessarily includes a radical dimension: to suffer alongside the poor. And their lives of mission and service, joy and suffering, stem from a deeper reality: these women are married to Jesus, having united themselves to him and his mission.
“We are spouses of Jesus Christ first,” Sr. Andrew explained, “and then this is the work he wants us to do for him. So, as a vocation that Jesus and the Father are calling us to, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, it’s not just ‘Okay, I want to help people.’ It goes way beyond that. I belong to Jesus. Everything. Body, heart, mind and soul. Then, if I live like that, I do his will with the work that we do.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, undergirding their mission is a profound spirit of prayer. After all, a bride has to speak to her husband! Beyond the post-Mass prayer to radiate Christ, their spouse, the Missionaries of Charity spend several hours in prayer each day, between Adoration, Mass, the Liturgy of the Hours, spiritual reading and extemporaneous prayers as they make their way on mission.
“I have to keep up a relationship with Jesus and talk to him,” Sr. Andrew said. “And then allow him to speak to me, and I have to listen to be able to allow him to speak to me.”
Without that foundational posture of “prayer without ceasing,” to which St. Paul exhorts us in his first letter to the Thessalonians, their work, their sacrifices, their grief, joy, sadness and consolation are all empty.
“I could be nice to all kinds of people in the world and not even believe in God. But if I do it with God, it has a lot more, a special meaning. This is what God wants me to do, to love my neighbor — to love my sisters and to love the people that we serve.
“We keep hope through our prayer life and knowing this is for Jesus. Jesus is giving me this work, and I pray for these people,” Sr. Andrew continued. “Then, I just have hope that one day, whether it be tomorrow, ten years from now, 20 years from now or on their deathbed, they will come to our Lord. So I don’t let it get me down because this is God’s work. He’s the one that has to touch them. I can do what I can do, but he’s the one that really has to work on their minds and hearts and bring them to him. I can do one part of it, but God has to take over and do the rest of it. I can’t save somebody from their misery, from Hell or from whatever, but Jesus can. He can do everything.”
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Radiating Christ
Prayed by the Missionaries of Charity following Mass
Dear Jesus, help us to spread Your fragrance everywhere we go. /
Flood our souls with Your spirit and life. /
Penetrate and possess our whole being, / so utterly, /
That our lives may only be a radiance of Yours. /
Shine through us, / and be so in us, / that every soul we come in contact with/ may feel Your presence in our soul. /
Let them look up and see no longer us, / but only Jesus! /
Stay with us, / and then we shall begin to shine as You shine; / So to shine as to be a light to others; /
The light, O Jesus, will be all from You, / none of it will be ours; / It will be You, shining on others through us. /
Let us thus praise you in the way You love best/ by shining on those around us. / Let us preach you without preaching, not by words but by our example, /By the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do, /The evident fullness of the love our hearts bear / to You.
Amen.
