Jacqueline de Decker

We owe much to British journalist Kathryn Spink, who has written beautifully of de Decker and her work in, among other places, I Need Souls Like You: Sharing in the Work of Mother Teresa Through Prayer and Suffering.

De Decker, born in 1913, came from a well-to-do Belgian family.  She made her way to India and, in 1947, walked halfway across the country to meet Mother Teresa.  Hoping to work with the Missionaries of Charity, instead she was forced back to Antwerp by a chronic, debilitating illness that affected the spine.

De Decker's dream seemed to be smashed.  She was devastated.

But in the fall of 1952, she received a letter from Mother Teresa that read in part:

"Today I am going to propose something to you.  You have been longing to be a missionary.  Why not become spiritually bound to our society which you love so dearly?  While we work in the slums, you share in the prayers and the work with your suffering and your prayers.  The work here is tremendous and needs workers, it is true, but I also need souls like yours to pray and suffer."

From among the ranks of fellow patients, de Decker found many people, each of whom was willing to become a "Sick and Suffering Co-Worker" and link with an individual Missionary of Charity.  In turn, Mother Teresa pledged to pray for them.

"By the time I met Jacqueline de Decker her torso was rigidly encased in a corset and her neck was restricted by a surgical collar," Spink writes on her website.  "Yet from her home in Antwerp she managed not only to coordinate the Link for the sick and suffering, but also to look after the welfare of scone 2,000 prostitutes."

On several occasions, Spink accompanied de Decker as she "careened" around Antwerp's red-light district in a specially-adapted car, tending to "her girls."

The experience, Spink observed, brought her "into contact with people suffering from every conceivable illness from elephantiasis to chronic depression.  And yet from most, if not all, of these encounters I came away in some unexpected way uplifted."

Mother Teresa came to call de Decker her "sick and suffering self."  "By 1980," Spink notes, "Jacqueline had undergone thirty-four operations for her illness, which was never given an official medical label.  She called it GGD, or 'God-Given Disease — her recognition that emptiness, 'failure,' and weakness were the means by which God used her."

De Decker died on April 3, 2009.

"Love demands sacrifice," wrote Mother Teresa.  "But if we love until it hurts, God will give us his peace and joy.... Suffering in itself is nothing; but suffering joined with Christ's Passion is a wonderful gift."

De Decker's radical apostolate of prayer and self-offering is a model for all of us.  In this Year of Mercy, let's pray that our own "God-given diseases" lead us to more compassion, more kindness.  Lets especially pray that they link us more closely to the rest of the world.