Mother Teresa: a biography

BATTLING SPIRITUAL POVERTY
Mother Teresa was most familiar with the conditions of the poor in
Third-World countries; however, when confronted with the poverty in
Western countries, she was not only shocked but appalled. On more than
one occasion, she noted with some irony how people in the West sent do-
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nations to her to help the poor in India, when at the same time they
turned their backs on those in their own countries who were suffering and
forgotten. In many areas, the Missionaries of Charity opened up Homes of
Compassion for the destitute men and women living on the streets. The
nuns also made a point of checking on the elderly and lonely who had no
one to look after them.
For Mother Teresa, the poverty that confronted her in such societies as
the United States and Great Britain was more a poverty of the spirit. It
came in the form of loneliness and being unwanted, plaguing the home-
less, the drifters, the alcoholics, and the mentally ill left to fend for them-
selves. What Mother Teresa found so troubling, as she traveled through
the rough neighborhoods of London or New York City, was society’s re-
sponse to these people: shunning them, abandoning them, or leaving
them at the mercy of those who were stronger.
Yet, Mother Teresa did not pass judgment on those societies. Instead,
she tried to point out as gently as she could that God did not make the
poor people in the world, nor did he create poverty and disorder. Rather,
it was because people did not share enough with one another that some
had plenty and others went without. When faced with the criticism that
helping all the needy in the world was a never-ending and hopeless task,
she replied that she and her sisters used themselves to save whom they
could, when they could. If pressed hard to reason out her mission as a re-
sult of that first foray into the Calcutta slums over 20 years before, she
might have been astounded to learn that she and her order had saved tens
of thousands of lives. But numbers were meaningless to Mother Teresa; for
her, each small act, each kindness extended toward those in need, was
done in the name of Christ. That was all.