Missionaries of Charity

I spent Palm Sunday in the South Bronx with the Missionaries of Charity - this is the order founded by Mother Theresa in 1950. They serve the very poorest of the poor, running soup kitchens and the like. I attended an early morning mass, then spent a few hours in the kitchen chopping lettuce and cutting the hot cross buns into pieces, so there would be enough to go around. We ended up with a lot of hot dashes.

I am still processing the experience. I puzzle over the place for the conservative Catholic movement in the modern world, but watching this group of barefoot women taking care of my city's homeless population - which the city does a very bad job at - affected me very deeply.

I didn't know that Mother Theresa was born in Albania - or that Albania was the first officially atheist country in the world. These facts and more from a story in today's Washington Post, about the floodgates being opened for religious freedom there, and the huge response of evangelists from around the world - Mormons, Greek Orhtodox, Muslims, Hare Krishna.

The Catholic cathedral that communists turned into a basketball arena for two decades is now busier than ever, drawing more than 2,000 people to a single Sunday Mass. An ornate Albanian Orthodox church with three grand, peach-colored domes is readying for Easter celebrations and popular midnight candlelit processions. And a few days ago, the latest of more than 50 mosques in the area opened with fanfare and a call to prayer.

There are also Bektashis, "a distinctive Sufi Muslim sect that maintains its world headquarters here."

Little Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu - aka Mother Theresa - should be proud.