Mother Teresa spent much of her life helping the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India. Mother Teresa's concern for the weak and poor extended to unborn children. Father Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life, has this to say about her:
Reflections on the life and work of Mother Teresa characteristically focuses on her "love for the poor." She did love the poor. But her understanding of what poverty is was much deeper than that of most observers. To understand it, we need to appreciate her message about what human beings are called to do. We were made to love and be loved, she would often remark. To give and receive love is the calling and greatness of human beings.
The fundamental poverty, then, is to fail to give and receive love. That is why a society which throws away its children by abortion is poorer than one which does not have many material resources. The society that permits abortion fails in its calling to give love, to welcome the inconvenient person. To fail to love is poverty. To fail to love to the point where the other person is not even recognized as a person, and is legally destroyed, is poverty to the extreme. Abortion is this extreme poverty in action.
Mother Teresa picked up the dying from the streets of Calcutta with the same love with which she pulled women away from abortion facilities. Love is indivisible. It means making room for the other person, whether that person is in the street or in the womb. It means feeding that person, not just with food for the body, but with the recognition, attention, and compassion that their personal dignity demands.
May Swaziland never fall into the deepest poverty, a poverty which discounts the life of a child as a disposable burden. May the nation protect her greatest resource-human beings-from conception to natural death.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
