From the book “Mother Teresa of Calcutta:”
. . . We often encountered very seriously handicapped children. Among them were several terribly deformed infants with elephantiasis, completely swollen faces or missing limbs. Often I was horrified and would have preferred to turn away. Mother Teresa only said, “What a wonderful child!”
To her it was clear that a ray of God’s light comes into the world even through severely handicapped children. Every child is a gift from God. The joy, the cheerfulness and the loving care that Mother Teresa showed children and very small babies made a great impression on us. I often thought that if God treats us as tenderly, as cheerfully and with as much joyful hope as Mother Teresa treats these little children, I still have a chance. To Mother Teresa, it was the most obvious thing in the world to treat every child with love.
That was probably the secret of her success: the power of tenderness. People were not touched by her because of any special intellectual accomplishments or her exemplary social achievements, but because they saw that she treated people with so much tenderness, empathy and self-sacrifice. What touches peoples hearts is when they feel how much they are loved. For Mother Teresa this was simply passing on the love that God had given her.
She accepted people whom we usually find rather repulsive with the same esteem as she gave to us. She spoke no differently with the president of a nation than with a prostitute, no different with a Carmelite nun than with Muhammad Ali, the world champion boxer who visited her in Calcutta. For many people this must have been a huge surprise—as it will probably be for us, too, when one day in heaven, we experience God’s goodness face-to-face, something we do not understand rationally.
Such goodness is deeply moving. When Mother Teresa welcomed groups of visitors and spoke with them for twenty minutes, often half of them went out afterward weeping or with tears in their eyes. Mother Teresa lived the powerlessness, indeed the helplessness, of love. She never tried to force anyone; she simply wanted to wrap other people in the web of love.
For this reason she found it all the more terrible that many parents reject their own child, that many children are “unwanted.” Again and again she warned, not just in personal conversations, but before the eyes and ears of the world, “Abortion is murder in the mother’s womb. A child is a gift from God. If you do not want it, then give it to me, I want it.”
Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She used the opportunity of her Nobel lecture, with the attention of a broad, international public focused on her, to speak out vehemently against abortion. “I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct killing, direct murder by the mother herself. . . . Many people are very, very concerned with the children of India, with the children of Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left [but] for me to kill you and you to kill me. There is nothing [in] between.
Those were very harsh words. The next day a priest who had herd her speech on the radio is said to have remonstrated with her; her words had offended many women in Scandinavia. Mother Teresa’s response was characteristic. She reportedly looked the young priest in the eyes and said, “Father, Jesus said, ‘I am the Truth’, and it is your duty and mine to speak the truth. Then it is up to the person who hears it whether to accept or reject it.’
Looking back I can say that Mother Teresa spoke the truth, whether it was convenient or not—but always with great love. ~ Leo Maasburg, Mother Teresa of Calcutta (Ignatius Press, 2011), 165-67
