Come and See: A Photojournalist's Journey into the World of Mother Teresa - Hardcover

According to statistics maintained by the Catholic Church, there were 81,551 nuns working in the subcontinent of India in 2000-more than those assigned to Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lank, and Bangladesh put together. These numbers are even more interesting when one considers that Christians represent only ten percent of the religious population of India-anad where Hindus constitute 806,366,000 and Muslims total 127,131,000. Among those nuns active in India are the amazin Sisters who work with the Missionaries of Chareity founded in l949 by a frail, tiny woman, born Agnes Gonzha Bojazhiu in Macedonia (now Yugoslavia) in l910 and who the world today knows as Mother Teresa. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in l979 and recognized in 2002 by Pope John Paul II for performing a miracle-the first step toward sainthood, Mother Teresa dedicated her life to the comfort and care of the needy, sick, and poor. The pope waived the customary five-year waiting period to begin the canonization process out of his deep admiration for her dedication to the destitute.When Mother Teresa died at age 87 in l997, she left behind a well-trained organization that today continues her work in countries around the world. Her order is the fastest growing throughout the Church. The work she performed, and that continues to be carried out by her Sisters, has been described as "heroic virtues" and the Missionaries of Charity are seen as a "world emblem of Christian charity." One cleric described the depths of Mtoher Teresa's holiness by saying that it placed her among the ranks of the great mystics in the history of the Christianity.In l995 a former photojournalist for CNN, Linda Schaefer, had a chance meeting with Mother Teresa during a visit to Atlanta, Georgia. Schaefer, who was given an opportunity to do a photo story for the Cable News Network, decided to turn the assignment into an adventure-a journey into the world of Mother Teresa. After numerous setbacks and refusals by Mother Teresa to allow photographs of her work to be taken, Schaefer put her cameras down and entered the world of this living saint-going to work in an orphanage in Calcutta. This led to a growing relationship between the two women that culminated in Linda being given permission to photograph whatever she felt would show the world the real environment in which this remarkable woman and her nuns and volunteers lived and worked.

Despite the carping of British socialist Christopher Hitchens, most people consider the ministry of the late Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity to the orphans, lepers, and dying, whom many have called the poorest of the poor, the most powerful argument for Christianity in the world today. Schaefer was affected powerfully enough by her ministry to pursue ardently the opportunity to photograph the order's leader and work, and then to put it off a bit, at Mother Teresa's request, to help care for the inmates at one of the order's facilities for the dying. Her account, unaffected to the point of naivete, of her encounters with Mother Teresa, India, and a cross section of the order's members and voluntary helpers stirs the emotions as hers were stirred by the order's work, even without the complement of 155 color photographs she eventually took of Mother Teresa and her work. In combination with those pictures, this unpretentious album's power is immense. A lovely testament of the healing of sufferers, healers, and observer alike. Ray Olson
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