NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
On September 5, 1997, the world said goodbye to one of its living saints—Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
The tiny Albanian sister, who spent nearly 50 years laboring among the poorest of the poor in India’s slums, traveled to America many times in her long life. She came to establish Missionaries of Charity communities in major metropolitan centers, including New York, San Francisco, and Dallas. She also came to open AIDS hospices and homeless shelters, receive honorary degrees, and meet with politicians.
During those visits, she unfailingly addressed what she saw as America’s greatest spiritual struggles: loneliness, materialism, and abortion. But perhaps on no other occasion did she confront those struggles as bluntly as she did at the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast.
During her address, Mother Teresa reminded President Bill Clinton and other U.S. political leaders present at the event that “it hurt” Jesus to love us: …it is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt. I must be willing to give whatever it takes not to harm other people and, in fact, to do good to them. This requires that I be willing to give until it hurts. Otherwise, there is no true love in me and I bring injustice, not peace, to those around me.
Mother Teresa concluded her remarks by focusing on the topic of abortion, saying:
But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.… Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.
In November 1996, a year before her death, the United States granted Mother Teresa honorary citizenship. Twenty years later, on September 4, 2016, she was canonized as Saint Teresa of Calcutta before a crowd of 120,000 in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
