Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson is joined by Missionaries of Charity Sisters Noreen and Tricia at a statue of Mother Teresa in its permanent location in the Knights of Columbus Museum.

A few weeks before the beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a bronze statue of the founder of the Missionaries of Charity was dedicated at the Knights of Columbus Museum in New Haven.

Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson was joined Oct. 3 by two sisters from the Missionaries of Charity in unveiling the statue, “The Angel of the Poor,” a life-size depiction of Mother Teresa carrying a dying child while another child reaches out for her embrace.

“It looks like a Pieta to me,” said Sister Tricia, who attended the ceremony with Sister Noreen. The two are members of a small Missionaries of Charity community in Bridgeport, Conn.

At the dedication ceremony Anderson said, “We unveil this statue today ‘for the glory of God and the good of our poor’ that Mother Teresa faithfully served.”

Pointing to the humility she embraced throughout her earthly life, Anderson said that Mother Teresa would be reluctant to be declared “Blessed Teresa of Calcutta” only six years after her death. He added, “I suspect that Mother Teresa would also be uncomfortable with a statue of her being permanently displayed in a museum. Mother Teresa was exceptionally averse to being honored.”

In 1992 she reluctantly agreed to receive the Order’s first Gaudium et Spes Award, Anderson noted, and she used the occasion to stress the need for Knights and all Christians to serve the “poorest of the poor.”

Created by Italian artist Tommaso Gismondi, who passed away earlier this year, the Mother Teresa statue was unveiled in its permanent location in the alcove of the museum’s Papal Gallery. It was first displayed in the museum in early 2002 in an exhibit on Gismondi, who did a number of works for the Vatican and the Knights of Columbus over the years.

“After meeting Mother Teresa,” Anderson stated, “Gismondi was so impressed that he wanted to remember her in this work as ‘strong … supporting the pain of a dying child in her arms and, at the same time, the hopes of a suffering child who invokes her embrace.’”

The supreme knight recalled Mother Teresa’s visit to the Order’s supreme headquarters in New Haven in 1988, when she delivered the manuscript of her congregation’s Constitutions, which was printed free by the Knights. She challenged the 500 employees “to the universal call to holiness, saying, ‘Holiness is not the luxury of the few – it is the simple duty for you and for me,’” Anderson said.

Sister Noreen said, “When she was alone with her sisters, she often mentioned the Knights of Columbus and the great help they have been to us, that they had helped us with the printing of our Constitutions, and other things.”

The sisters gave out prayer cards for the canonization of Mother Teresa and a small medal with her image.

The Knights of Columbus underwrote the costs of the satellite uplink from Rome of the beatification ceremony on Oct. 19.