Mother Teresa’s “Spiritual Powerhouse”

Jacqueline de Decker and the Link for Sick and Suffering Co-Workers

By: Kathryn Spink

When I met Jacqueline de Decker, the Belgian woman whom Mother Teresa called her “sick and suffering self,” she had her torso encased in a corset and wore a surgical collar round her neck. Even then in 1980, almost thirty years before her death, she was so disabled that she could only drive about her native city of Antwerp in a specially adapted car.

Rotten Little Salmon. Jacqueline was born on May 5, 1913, one of nine children in an aristocratic Catholic household with several servants. When she was fifteen, she injured her spine in a diving accident; it taught her “a certain acceptance of suffer­ing.” By her late teens, she felt called to the religious life and tested her vocation with the Missionary Sisters of Mary. The sisters housed her in a huge convent set aside for “come and sees” and served her tinned salmon for supper. Not realizing that her stomach was riddled with fibrosis and that she could not tolerate tinned food, Jacqueline ate the meal and fell violently ill. Reflecting on this event, she later said:

I realized I could give myself to God and stay in the world. That tinned salmon showed me that I was not to…