Florida Catholic | Mother Teresa’s Lawyer Reflects On Her Humanity

Mother Teresa’s lawyer reflects on her humanity

Jim Towey, a close friend of and attorney for Blessed Mother Teresa, talks about the human side of the Catholic nun who devoted her life to the poor.

BENNET BOLTON | FLORIDA CATHOLIC CORRESPONDENT

Published: 03.07.08

Jim Towey, shown introducing his son to Mother Teresa, was legal counsel and friend to the Catholic nun from 1985 until the time of her death in 1997.

Courtesy Photo
Jim Towey, shown introducing his son to Mother Teresa, was legal counsel and friend to the Catholic nun from 1985 until the time of her death in 1997.

LAKE WORTH | Although beatified and on her way to sainthood, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta was “very much human and very much an earthly mother who lived life to the full,” declared a friend who was with her when she died.

Jim Towey, Mother Teresa’s legal counsel during her final 12 years of life, enthralled a near-capacity audience in the Duncan Theater at Palm Beach Community College in February with an hourlong lecture about Mother Teresa’s values and how he happened to become part of her life. The presentation was sponsored by Hospice of Palm Beach County.

Towey was informed when Mother Teresa lay dying in 1997, and he flew from Washington, D.C., to Calcutta in order to be with her. Some of the nuns in the Missionaries of Charity religious order she founded met him at the airport, and took him straight to the hospital, telling Towey that she was now on oxygen and near death.

“She kept pointing up at the ceiling from her bed and we did not know what she was doing,” said Towey. “So she removed her (oxygen) mask and said, ‘I am going home to die.’”

Mother Teresa died Sept. 5, 1997. She was 87.

While Mother Teresa had heart problems in her last years, Towey said, she never caught any contagious diseases from the poor to whom she ministered.

“Mother had malaria (which does not spread from human to human) dozens of times and many of her nuns caught tuberculosis, but she never did,” said Towey, who is president of St. Vincent College, a Benedictine school in Latrobe, Pa.

His own journey toward Mother Teresa began in 1985, when he was working in Washington on the staff of a senator. Despite his success, he felt dissatisfied.

“I had become successful, I now had money for the first time, but my life was empty,” he revealed. “I went to Calcutta out of curiosity, yet I went with difficulty because I did not want to be around the poor. I intended to spend just one day in Calcutta, then five days in Hawaii on the way back. I went to Mass that first morning in India, and on the way I saw families living on the pavement with nothing but the clothes on their backs. So here I was now sitting on a beach in Hawaii and I was as uncomfortable surrounded by wealth as I had been in Calcutta surrounded by poverty. The pineapples were healthier than the people I had just left.”

Mother Teresa, he described, “was this tiny woman with big hands. She was everything that I wasn’t. She fed the poor with her own hands. She was very much a mother. I met her when she was 75. She spoke of the poor as being Jesus in disguise. She described herself at the end of her life as a pencil in the hand of God.”

Returning to Washington, Towey began to work there for Mother Teresa as a full-time volunteer at her hospice for AIDS patients. He made several trips with her, including one to Tijuana, Mexico, where she created a home for the destitute and dying.

“Mother Teresa left Albania in 1928 when she was 18 and went to India as a missionary teacher,” said Towey. “Otherwise, she would have become a peasant woman in her native land.”

With the coming of independence for India in 1947, he continued, Mother Teresa saw starving people breaking into homes and stealing food.

“She said the Lord called out to her, ‘Come and be a light to my people,’ so she was born to lead,” Towey said. “What did she see? She did not see leprosy and AIDS. She saw loneliness. The poverty of loneliness is so much deeper than the poverty of the flesh.”

Towey said he will never forget many things that Mother Teresa expressed, such as:

“If we are too busy to pray, then we are too busy.”

“Yesterday is gone, tomorrow is not here yet. All we have is today.”

“You must love until it hurts.”

Towey noted that one big danger he sees with her beatification is that she will be turned into a little statue, rather than remembered as a human being.

“Mother Teresa was in love with life,” he said. “She loved music, poetry and chocolate ice cream. Ice cream does not hold up very well in the heat of India. So when someone sent her a frozen block of chocolate ice cream, she asked one of the sisters to bring her a hammer — and she smashed the frozen ice cream into little pieces that she ate.”

Towey and his wife are the parents of five children. Not long after their son Jamie was born, he said, Mother Teresa was introduced to the infant.

“She reached out to touch the baby and, as babies often do, he clutched one of her fingers and put it in his mouth,” Towey related. “Later, when he was able to understand, I asked him, ‘What do you think St. Peter is going to say when he finds out you bit Mother Teresa’s finger?’”

One of Towey’s tasks as Mother Teresa’s legal counsel was to protect the use of her name, so that it would not be abused and mishandled by others. He also had to convince well-meaning supporters not to raise money for her.

“She said she believed in the divine providence of God to take care of whatever is needed,” he added. “What Mother Teresa brought to the church and the world was recognition of a need for a relationship with the poor — not simply writing checks, but getting to know them. She realized that the poor had, in many ways, a gift to give others that would help us understand more about ourselves, more about life.”

Mother Teresa herself encouraged Towey to found Aging with Dignity, a program that encourages seniors to express to their adult children or other surrogates their desires as the end of their lives approach.

He told his audience this about the elderly: “Children become our guides. They teach us about aging. The intergenerational concept is this: When you are little I will care for you; when I am old you can care for me.”

In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Towey to direct the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives, a position he held for four years.

Today, Mother Teresa’s nuns and volunteers carry on her work in more than 700 homes and hospices in 125 nations worldwide.

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