Mother Teresa is set to be canonized as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church in September this year, as announced by Pope Francis this past March after he confirmed her second miracle, the healing of a man with multiple tumors. In honor of the an- nouncement, Johnny Church at St. Aloysius’s Church on Woodstock Road has set up a new exhibition documenting her life and works. The exhibition was opened on April 18 in the Oxford Oratory following a special Mass and will be open until April 30. The exhibition includes striking images from the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s youth and family life in Albania, her time spent learning English in Ireland, and her early years as a missionary. These evocative photographs are balanced by objects that connect the visitor more materi- ally to her lived experience, including things such as her sari, a selection of her letters and a handwritten prayer book. Other points of interest include images from her visit to the Oxford Union and her meeting with Princess Diana, who died only a few days before Mother Teresa died during one of her mis- sions in the Bronx, NYC in 1997. Surrounded by such emotional, intimate photographs of her labors, one can’t help but be awestruck by the devotion that Mother Teresa had to help- ing others, despite any disputes concerning her faith that have arisen since her beatifica- tion in 2003 by Pope John Paul II. St. Aloysius’s Church reminds its visitors that while we sometimes focus only on the extraordinary deeds of society’s heroes, we often forget that such figures were also ordinary humans fac- ing human challenges.
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