Before the Catholic Church canonized Saint Teresa of Calcutta as a saint in 2016, almost ten years after her death, she was best known as Mother Teresa of Calcutta, an iconic figure known for her selfless sacrifice as a Roman Catholic nun and missionary. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, and dedicated her entire life and her entire being to helping the poor in Calcutta, India.
She devoted her life’s work to serving the abandoned, the dying, and orphaned children.
Her birth name was Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu. She was of Albanian-Indian ethnicity, living to the age of 87, dying of natural causes in 1997.
She was a very small, slight, and quiet woman who looked so fragile that you would think she was the one in need of charity, but it was she who was the servant of those living in poverty. If you know anything of Saint Teresa, you probably can picture her in that trademark white sari with blue-striped borders, her dark, weathered skin, and those penetrating eyes. You could tell just by looking at her that she had seen more in her life than you can imagine.
She had a special relationship with Pope John Paul II, both of them sharing the same convictions of faith and a deep-seated opposition to abortion and euthanasia, which had started to take hold and grow in Western society. He was canonized in 2014.
As advocates for those in need, both Mother Teresa and John Paul were outspoken and powerful voices on Catholic doctrine and the belief that everyone is born with intrinsic dignity. This includes the lives of the unborn, the sick, the terminally ill, and the destitute.
And so it was that one fateful day, this slight, quiet old woman, bent over from age and years of hardship, would make her way to Washington, D.C., to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 3, 1994. Bill Clinton was president at the time, and so he and First Lady Hillary Clinton were in attendance, along with Vice President Al Gore, his wife Tipper, and a slew of legislators, senators, and other dignitaries.
Roughly 3,000 were in attendance that morning at the Washington Hilton hotel. The 83-year-old nun had decided that the theme of her keynote address would be tied to 25:40 in the gospel of Matthew, which says in the King James version, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
When it was time for her to speak, Mother Teresa talked about the sorts of things you’d have expected her to cover – love, serving people in poverty, the family, materialism, and selfishness. No doubt the Clintons were not surprised by this. They had to be quite comfortable with themselves and their decision to attend the event, which they probably thought was little more than a photo op.
But Mother Teresa was no politician or diplomat. If she had something to say, she was gonna say it, and she did. She took opportunity to speak truth to power. In other words, she raised the issue of abortion to the most pro-abortion president and First Lady in the history of the issue up to that time.
After some predictable pleasantries, and some discussion of scripture and Jesus’s sacrifice, just a few feet away from the Clintons, she said, “I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.”
This is where the Clintons kept their chins up, but even so, you could tell they were starting to squirm.
By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And, by abortion, that father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. The father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion, Mother Teresa added.
She wasn’t done. She talked about the hypocrisy of people in the West who fashion themselves as caring for the poor and the needy, who say they care about the victims of violence, “But often these same people are not concerned with the millions who are being killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today — abortion which brings people to such blindness.”
Mother Teresa advocated for adoption instead of abortion, to give that child a chance to live.
When she was finished speaking to that American audience, 3,000 people in a packed ballroom rose to their feet and gave her a long standing ovation. Based on news reports, the Clintons and the Gores were said to have stayed seated and did not applaud.
Abortion is a religion to the left, and this story illustrates it. Sitting in the presence of an actual saint and not able to show her the same respect that everyone else in the room gave her.
Often when we talk about good vs. evil, we think in dramatic terms, like a battle or a confrontation, but sometimes, and this was one of those times, the battle between God and the devil is more subtle, more understated, but it's painfully obvious. Guess who was on the side of evil?
In her own 2003 memoir called Living History, Hillary Clinton wrote about that event and her encounter with Mother Teresa.
“She had just delivered a speech against abortion, and she wanted to talk to me,” Clinton remembered. “Mother Teresa was unerringly direct. She disagreed with my views on a woman’s right to choose and told me so.”
One unverified story that has circulated ever since that prayer breakfast alleges that Clinton asked Mother Teresa what her theory would be as to why the U.S. had not yet elected a woman president.
As the story goes, Mother Teresa responded, “Because she has probably been aborted.”
Clinton’s obsession with wanting to sit in the Oval Office as president has long been known by anyone and everyone, so it wouldn’t be surprising in the least if this were true.
Regardless, one thing that can’t be questioned is that there was one day in 1994 where one of God’s angels stood defiantly next to the Clintons and made it clear to them and everyone watching that they were the ones on the side of evil.
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