Canonization Miracle for St. Teresa of Calcutta

The room held the smell of boiled rice and old cotton. I stood at the foot of the cot with a basin of water while Sister Bartholomea lifted Monica Besra onto her side. The woman’s knees stayed drawn to her chest. Every breath came short, as if the air itself pressed against the swelling below her navel. She had arrived three days earlier from the district hospital, sent home with a paper that said tuberculosis treatment and a note about an ovarian mass. The sisters kept the paper folded inside a tin box on the shelf.

Outside the window the mango tree dropped leaves onto the tin roof. Inside, the only sound was the scrape of the cot legs when Monica tried to shift. She could not straighten. She kept one hand pressed against the right side of her belly and the other gripping the edge of the mattress. Sister Ann Sevika brought a cup of weak tea and set it on the floor because Monica could not sit up to take it.

On the fifth morning Sister Bartholomea came in carrying a small oval medal on a black thread. She had taken it from the frame that held Mother Teresa’s photograph on the opposite wall. She washed the medal with the same water we used for the patients, then dried it on the hem of her sari. Monica watched without speaking. The sister placed the medal flat against the skin just above the waistband of the cotton petticoat and tied the thread twice so it would not slip. She said nothing about what would happen next. She only told Monica to rest as best she could.

That night the woman slept on her back for the first time since she had come. By the third morning the swelling had flattened enough that the thread lay loose against her skin. Monica stood at the doorway and walked the length of the veranda without holding the wall. She asked for rice and ate it sitting on a low stool. The sisters collected the thread and the medal and put them back in the tin box. No one wrote anything down that day.

Word reached the Missionaries of Charity house in Kolkata within the week. A priest came to Patiram and asked Monica to repeat what she remembered. She spoke in Santhali and the priest wrote in Bengali. He read the page back to her and she nodded. The page went into an envelope with the medal and was carried to the diocesan office. Thirty-four thousand other pages already waited there.

Months later the same priest returned with two doctors from Siliguri. They examined Monica in the same room where the cot had stood. They asked her to describe the pain before and after the thread was tied. She answered that the pain had left on the third day and had not returned. The doctors wrote their own notes and took them away. They did not say whether the notes agreed with the hospital records from Balurghat or from North Bengal Medical College.

In December 2002 a meeting took place behind closed doors at the Vatican. Doctors and cardinals sat together. They reviewed the statements, the hospital discharge papers, the sonogram reports that had shown the mass, and the later papers that showed no mass. The rationalist groups in Kolkata had already sent letters pointing out that tuberculosis treatment can shrink certain growths. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints recorded the letters but declared the disappearance of the tumor scientifically inexplicable on the evidence presented. The decree was prepared for the Pope’s signature.

Monica Besra remained in Dangram. She still spoke only Santhali and a little Bengali. She had never learned to read the statement that had been written for her. When visitors came she sometimes showed them the place on her stomach where the thread had rested. She said the pain had gone and she could stand straight. She did not claim to understand the meetings in Rome.

The beatification date was set for the following October. Another miracle would still be required before any further step. The sisters in Patiram continued their work with patients who arrived on stretchers and left on foot or did not leave at all. The tin box stayed on the shelf. The photograph of Mother Teresa remained on the wall. The mango tree dropped its leaves each season onto the same stretch of ground.