Mother Theresa

“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 Price 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 war, 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 heard 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.”

—From Msgr. Leo Maasburg’s book, “Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait.” See more at www.MotherTeresaStories.com