On August 26th, 2010 the world celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Blessed Teresa of Kolkata (Calcutta). Mother Teresa, a devout Catholic, abandoned everything to follow Jesus into the slums and serve him amongst the poorest of the poor. She lived her life at a very deep spiritual level and was admired by millions throughout the world.
She cared especially for those who were often treated as outsiders in their own communities--the starving, the crippled, the impoverished, the diseased and the dying, from the old woman with a brain tumor in Calcutta to the young man with AIDS in New York City. Her special focus was the care of mothers and their children. This included mother who felt pressured to sacrifice their unborn children by want, neglect, despair, and philosophies and government policies that promote the dehumanization of inconvenient human life.
"Roe v. Wade", she said "deformed a great nation (America). She added, "The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.... It has portrayed the greatest of gifts-a child-as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience." She believed that loneliness was "the greatest poverty" of all and saw the West as prey to a soulless materialism.
Though she received many awards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 she confessed "It is not success, but the dedication to one's faith that is important."
Mother Teresa died on September 5,1997 at the age of 87. Today, over 3,000 nuns and over 500 monks in 710 institutions in 133 countries of the world are members of Mother Teresa's order "The Missionaries of Charity".
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