British academic takes issue with Vatican on St Teresa name

Mangalore Today News Network

London, Oct 29, 2016: The first academic lecture on Mother Teresa since her canonization will hear one of her countrymen arguing that the Church has unwittingly belittled the world renowned nun’s legacy by tying her name to Kolkata.

Mother Teresa’s impact on alleviating the poverty in the eastern Indian city was marginal. “The real value of Mother Teresa’s work and message is essentially of a symbolic nature,” Gezim Alpion, a British academic, will assert at the first part of his new series of lectures on the founder of the Missionaries of Charity congregation.

Alpion , who campaigned for two years for Mother Teresa’s canonization, contends that the Holy See’s newest saint should be known not as Saint Teresa of Calcutta but as Saint Mother Teresa. Pope Francis canonized her at the Vatican on September 4.

Alpion will deliver the lecture at the Albanian Embassy in London on October 27. Albania’s Ambassador in the UK Qirjako Qirko, who invited Alpion of the University of Birmingham, told media that the event is “a token of appreciation for Mother Teresa’s outstanding contribution as a spiritual and humanitarian icon who devoted her life to the poorest of the poor.”

Highlighting that the Albanians are proud that the newest saint is an Albanian, Qirko added, “I am grateful to Professor Alpion, an outstanding scholar of the life and work of St Teresa of Calcutta, for accepting my invitation.”

Alpion’s lectures on the sociology of religion are reportedly thought-provoking. He is considered ‘the most authoritative English-language author’ on Mother Teresa. His talks are consistently well attended, reports say.

Alpion’s forthcoming London lecture at the Embassy of Albania promises to be equally thought-provoking, as seen from the abstract published on his public Facebook.

The abstract of Dr Alpion’s London lecture is available at: https://www.facebook.com/DrGezimAlpionUK

At the start of this lecture, titled “Saint Teresa of darkness and the menace of anthropolarity,” Alpion will share with the audience his impressions from the canonization ceremonies he attended at the Vatican from September 3-4.

The London lecture consists of three parts.

Initially, Alpion focuses on the nature of Mother Teresa’s relationship with her closest friend, Pope Saint John Paul II. In this part of the talk Alpion will assess the important role the nun and the pontiff, who Alpion calls a ‘formidable duo of outsiders’, had on each other’s ministry and papacy.

The attention in the lecture then shifts to the interrelationship between Mother Teresa’s ‘charism’ and her mediatised ‘charisma’. In this part Alpion explores the role of religion in addressing social fragmentation in postmodernism; he also assesses Mother Teresa’s charisma from a post-Weberian perspective.

In the last part of the lecture, Alpion draw upon the work of Aristotle on ‘human good’, ‘continence’, and ‘ends’, as well as on the views of early Christian writers, such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen, to highlight that Mother Teresa’s ‘aggregative’ ‘love in action’ and preaching will serve the Church and humanity better if they are seen not in a narrow Calcutta context, which her name as a saint clearly implies, but as a message of hope on a global scale.

Alpion will conclude the lecture highlighting that “with her devotion to ‘human debris’, Saint Mother Teresa, who was never cured of her ‘dark night of the soul’, is yet another proof that, as a species, we have an innate sense of responsibility towards fellow members of the human race.”