The story of her surprising cure has been carved and softened by years, but Monica Besra can still recite it by heart.
Besra,
who is from a tribal community in eastern India, was so sick she could
barely walk when nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, the order
founded by Mother Teresa, helped her to a small prayer room one day in
1998.
She paused by a photo of the nun and suddenly felt a
“blinding light” emanating from the portrait, and it passed through her
body. Later, other nuns pressed a religious medal on her belly, swollen
from a tumor, and prayed over Besra as she lay in bed.
She says she awoke at 1 a.m., her body feeling lighter, the tumor seemingly gone.
“I was so happy at that moment I wanted to tell everyone: I am cured,” Besra recalled Wednesday during an interview at her home.
In
2002, the Vatican certified Besra’s case as a “miracle,” the first
milestone in the journey to sainthood for Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the
Albanian nun who has been canonized on Sunday, Sept 4, at the Vatican by Pope Francis.
Mother
Teresa was considered a living saint by many believers during her
lifetime, but Besra’s story has always been treated with skepticism in
India because doctors and the state health minister debunked it at the
time.
They have long maintained
that Besra had been suffering from a cyst, not a cancerous tumor. The
doctors have said she recovered after she received tuberculosis
treatment for several months at a government hospital in Balurghat,
about 270 miles north of the city where Mother Teresa spent decades
ministering to the destitute and dying.
“I’ve said several times
that she was cured by the treatment, and nothing has happened,” one of
the doctors involved, Ranjan Mustafi, said in a brief telephone
interview.
For the Catholic Church to declare someone a saint
requires an investigation into that person’s life, faith and good works
that can take years. Two “miracles” credited to prayers to the
prospective saint must be recognized — one before the beatification
rite, the penultimate phase of the process, the second before sainthood.
Catholic
Bishop Salvatore Lobo, who chaired the local committee that
investigated Besra’s case for the Vatican, said they repeatedly asked
Mustafi and the two others to testify but they never appeared.
Meanwhile, he said, several other doctors involved in her treatment
confirmed Besra’s version of events. He declined to provide their names.
“She
was very sick, and she had a tumor and that tumor was cured after the
intercession of Mother Teresa,” he said. “That is what is believed, and
those are the facts.”
Prabir Ghosh, the president of the Science
and Rationalists’ Society of India, based in Calcutta, now known as
Kolkata, called the case “false” and said that encouraging stories of
mystical healings could be detrimental to public health.
Mother
Teresa — who was born in Skopje, now the capital of Macedonia — came to
India as a young nun and began working with the poor in the slums around
Kolkata. She became known as the “saint of the gutters” for her work
with the poor, orphaned children and the terminally ill.
She went
on to found a religious order that has spread to more than 130
countries around the world, and in 1979, she was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize. Near the end of her life, she traveled the globe as a staunch
supporter of the Catholic Church’s position against abortion and
contraception. She died in 1997 at age 87.
Besra, who says she is
about 50 years old now, was flown by the Missionaries of Charity to
attend Mother Teresa’s beatification in St. Peter’s Square in Rome in
2003, presided over by an ailing Pope John Paul II. She will not be
attending Sunday’s canonization.
The Vatican later credited Mother Teresa with a second miracle
when a Brazilian man recovered from a life-threatening bacterial
infection of the brain after his wife prayed to the nun, paving the way
for Sunday’s sainthood ceremony.
As evening fell Wednesday,
Besra, her husband and members of her extended family gathered outside
her modest concrete home as she recounted her story.
She
is a slight woman with her hair wound in a bun who still wears a silver
Mother Teresa medal around her neck. She says it’s the same medal the
sisters once pressed against her distended belly.
The
family had endured financial hardship and long separations during her
protracted illness, so her husband, Selku Murmu, 60, said he was
relieved when Besra recovered so quickly. Although he once told
reporters he believed his wife recovered after medical treatment, he now says he was misquoted.
“It
happened due to the blessings of Mother Teresa,” he said. “She prayed a
long time to her. I went to many doctors and she was not getting well.
After that day, she was cured.”
The couple, who own about three
acres of rice paddy, have gotten a bit of support in the intervening
years from the Missionaries of Charity, including assistance with school
expenses for their five children. Last year, a local priest built a
small green chapel opposite their home where the related families
worship most Sundays. They all converted to Catholicism more than a
decade ago.
Besra has been healthy since her illness and says she
still doesn’t quite understand the significance of what the Catholic
Church thinks happened to her.
“I can’t explain why I was chosen,” Besra said. “I’m normal — just like other people.”
