A special connection to Mother Teres

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/10/2016 (3510 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’ve always been fascinated by Mother Teresa.

And when I heard that the person who was responsible for researching and working for many years for her canonization grew up in our very own north Winnipeg, I couldn’t help but be intrigued — and also proud.

On Sept. 4, 2016, the diminutive and unassuming Albanian grocer’s daughter who dedicated her life to the sick, the poor and the dying was proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis in a ceremony in Rome.

“Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, a priest of Mother Teresa’s religious order, Missionaries of Charity Fathers, grew up in the North End,” said Fr. Dmytro Dnistrian, CSsR, pastor at St. Joseph’s Ukrainian Catholic Church on Jefferson Avenue.

Kolodiejchuk had the responsibility of “gathering and documenting all the information needed for the canonization of Mother Teresa,” Fr. Dmytro explained.

After Mother Teresa died in 1997 at the age of 87, Kolodiejchuk was named the postulator of the “Cause of Beatification and Canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.”

A large part of his job was to gather the evidence of two confirmed miracles. The local priest told one reporter that he collected 35,000 pages in 81 volumes — 113 witnesses who answered a series of 263 questions. Seventeen volumes became the witness material. All over a period of 17 years.

In a recent interview for Salt+Light Media with Fr. Thomas Rosica, CSB, in Toronto, Kolodiejchuk talked about meeting Mother Teresa for the first time in the 1970s in Rome when his sister entered the Missionaries of Charity.

She pinned a cross on the astonished young man, who was in his early 20s then, and who had travelled there with his parents for the ceremony. 

In speaking with Rosica, Kolodiejchuk described Mother Teresa as someone who had weak health but an exceptionally strong character, who was motherly and caring and who chose to live simply among the poor.

“Before he (Kolodiejchuk) entered the Missionaries of Charity,” said Fr. Dmytro, “he was a student studying for our community, the Ukrainian Catholic Redemptorists. His ordination to the priesthood took place at our Redemptorist parish, St. John’s Ukrainian Catholic Church in Newark, New Jersey.”

Kolodiejchuk was also ordained by the late Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan Archbishop of Winnipeg, Maxim Hermaniuk the local pastor said, “who flew to N.J. to ordain him in the presence of family, friends, and yes, Mother Teresa.”

The Missionaries of Charity opened in Winnipeg in about 1984, said one of the local sisters. A soup kitchen is run out of the humble Aikens Street location. By 1997 the sisters were established in over 123 countries of the world dedicating themselves as Mother Teresa did to those in need and to the poorest of the poor.

Cheryl Girard is a community correspondent for West Kildonan. You can contact her at girard.cheryl@gmail.com