There are approximately 80,000 Catholics in Georgia - around 2% of the total population. They are mostly found either in Tbilisi or in the southern region of the country, where exclusively Catholic villages exist. I wrote about our Catholic Church in Tbilisi and our Easter last spring, so please check it out if interested.
The Catholics in Tbilisi are mostly Georgians and Armenians, as well as a small Assyrian community of the Chaldean Rite. Our Church of St. Peter and Paul provides Mass in English, catering for the growing Catholic expatriate population of Americans, Europeans, Indians and Maltese. There are only about 1000 practicing Catholics in Tbilisi. Many other Catholic churches were confiscated by the Georgian Orthodox Church after the fall of communism when the state gave all church property back to the Georgian Orthodox church. But there are two Catholic Churches in Tbilisi now.
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| I attended the Palm Sunday Mass in Georgian this year. Lovely choir in the choir loft, with the BIG organ |
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| This Palm Sunday procession around the church, with hymns sung and a portable amplifier |
I have often been joined at Mass with some lovely Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, and have been invited to visit them. Since it is again Easter week, I thought I would write a little about the "the sisters of Mother Teresa," of whom I have always been curious and about their homeless shelter. So I took them up on their offer to visit while I was in the city.
I was surprised with what I found. First, this was a lovely relatively new building, built by international Caritas donations in 1999. Caritas Georgia
is a Charitable Foundation of the Catholic Church, founded in 1994, dedicated
to the service of the poor in Georgia
and to the promotion of charity and justice. It was a lovely place.
Pope John Paul II came to bless
the new house and stayed overnight at the Center. And Mother Teresa also came to Georgia
when they originally established a home here. I had never been in a place where the Pope slept, so it gave me pause.
But this was not what one would expect of a homeless shelters, at least in what I was used to, in America. This homeless shelter had a few middle age men or women, but mostly it was a safety net for the elderly poor. These 20 something residents should have been in a nursing home, or convalescent home. Many were in wheel chairs. The residents currently are Georgian, Armenian, and Russian, but that changes. The sisters take care of them, cook for them and nurse them. Most of the sisters do not have nurses training. One man was released from the hospital straight to the Center after a bad automobile accident. And the sisters simply went to the hospital to be shown how to care for his two broken arms and amputated leg stump. They do good work and it certainly isn't easy.
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| An older picture of the 6 sisters in Tbilisi |
Mother Teresa's canonization for sainthood if hypothetically slated for September 4th, 2016. All the nuns are in a lottery to be allowed to go to the canonization.
So I will leave you best wishes for a special Easter. Here is our newest addition to the Koda neighborhood, a little guy, just in time for Easter. God bless you on this special time and throughout the year. Remember here they honor the dead at their Easter with graveyard picnics for two days. I think it is a lovely practice and one I hope to carry on back in the States.
