Word: teresa
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...until two years later did the sisters take on one of their harshest and most widely admired tasks, care of the dying. Mother Teresa remembers finding a dying woman on the sidewalk, her feet half chewed away by rats, her wounds alive with maggots. Only with great difficulty did she persuade a hospital to take the woman. Within days the nun was pleading with authorities for "just one room" to which she could take the dying. What they gave her was a onetime pilgrims' rest house near the Temple of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. She renamed...
...wonderment. Muggeridge claims a modern sort of miracle for it. Some photos shot in the infirmary's hopelessly dim light, he says, turned out to be bathed in an inexplicably soft glow. Calcutta Journalist Desmond Doig, a self-described skeptic and author of a forthcoming book on Mother Teresa, reports a more personal miracle. Instead of finding the place repugnant, he became so suffused with its compassion that he began to nurse the patients himself. "Our work," explains Mother Teresa, "brings people face to face with love...
...Nirmal Hriday nor any other of Mother Teresa's homes does anyone get a sectarian hard sell. The dying get the rituals they want: Ganges water on the lips for the Hindu, readings from the Koran for the Moslem, last rites for the occasional Catholic. Babies left at Shishu Bhavan, the busy Calcutta center that feeds the hungry and shelters abandoned children, remain Moslems or Hindus if the parents wish; only foundlings are baptized. The nun who runs the center conspiratorially reveals that the sisters have saved more than one Hindu marriage from family pressure by quietly providing...
Such understanding of local ways is typical of Mother Teresa, who became a citizen of India in 1948. But her Catholic orthodoxy does not bend far. Though the sisters operate 28 family-planning centers in India and elsewhere round the world, the only birth control they offer is the papally-approved rhythm method. As for abortion, Mother Teresa calls it a crime that kills not only the child but the consciences of all involved...
...Mother Teresa and her sisters are not without their critics. To some, the nuns and brothers are merely bandaging a civic wound that needs drastic surgery. "We are not trying so much to do social work," Mother Teresa explains, "as to live out that life of love, of compassion, that God has for his people." The poor, she says, suffer even more from rejection than material want. "If we didn't discard them they would not be poor. An alcoholic in Australia told me that when he is walking along the street he hears the footsteps of everyone coming...