Against the backdrop of having lost 57 million Americans to abortion since it was legalized in the United States, living in a culture where HBO runs a series aimed at normalizing abortion, and facing a presidential candidate who once said abortion should be safe, legal and rare now advocating abortion on demand at any time in pregnancy paid for by taxpayer dollars, our “shout your abortion” world needs the antidote of Mother Teresa’s gift of love and human dignity more than ever.
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As St. Francis did many centuries before, Mother Teresa preached the Gospel with her life.
He said that on September 7-8, pilgrims would be allowed to visit the room Teresa used on visits to Rome, in the convent of the Church of San Gregorio Magno near the Colosseum, where her Missionaries of Charity have a local branch. In it he described her as a “fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud”.
In late 2002, the Vatican ruled that an Indian woman’s stomach tumor had been miraculously cured after prayers to Mother Teresa.
She will be canonized in a ceremony overseen by Pope Francis in Rome. “There are no strikes”.
The Roman Catholic nun and Nobel Prize victor was world-famous for her service to the “poorest of the poor”.
Starting small with one of its earliest ventures – a home for the dying – coming up in an abandoned Kali temple, it is now active in 133 countries, running homes for HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis patients, soup kitchens, dispensaries and mobile clinics, orphanages, schools and counselling centres.
His book captures how nothing was beneath Mother Teresa. “She’s not remote. She’s not a ideal, flawless saint”.
Chatterjee collaborated with Hitchens in a sceptical Channel 4 documentary, Hell’s Angel, in 1994, and wrote Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict in 2003. One of the Church Fathers said that long ago. “It is much ado about nothing”, he told TIME.
“I just thought that this myth had to be challenged”, he added.
When Mother Teresa spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1997, Hillary Clinton was present in her role as first lady.
The Archbishop of Winnipeg, Richard Gagnon, said the work of Mother Teresa exemplified what Pope Francis has touched on throughout his papacy: the need to go to the peripheries and to reach out to people most in need – especially the very poor.
This is something the Missionaries of Charity firmly rejects. An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. According to the worldwide joint general secretary of one such organisation, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi should not be sending a delegation to the Vatican for Sunday’s ceremony.
Reported by The Indian Express, Surendra Jain said: “The canonisation of Mother Teresa is an alarm bell that now there would be more conversions in India and more funds [for conversions] would be routed to India”.
Parents love how the doll is a replica of a saint of our time, an easy teaching tool to remind children about the heroic sanctity of Mother Teresa’s life on earth. She sought to satiate what she believed was God’s thirst by loving the poor. She did not mince words and was single-focused in her mission.
And perhaps just as significant, in terms of her public perception, is the sense among Christians that her critics don’t really understand what she was doing. So to criticise her for opposing abortion and contraception, for instance, is to criticise her for not running a secular charity, which she never pretended to do.
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The failings of her hospitals and shortcomings of her nursing staff are harder to excuse. “She had them in abundance”. Her weakened heart finally gave out. After visiting the facilities she’s responsible for starting, he feels only a “troubled individual” could have set them up.
