Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016, Pope Francis canonized Mother Teresa, now to be known as Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Her elevation to sainthood was unusually widely-covered in the secular media as she is one of the few saints in living memory who was also a public figure, and it has sparked controversy often because of her opposition to abortion and her strong faith standing as underpinnings to her charitable work. However, her own pro-life remarks reveal an internal consistency, rather than deplorable bias.
Her Life and Anti-Abortion Remarks
Born Angeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Albania in 1910, she founded the Missionaries of Charity (MC) in 1950 to serve the impoverished and the dying in Kolkata, India and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, after which she continued her work feeding the hungry and founding homes for the dying until her death in 1997.
As Mother Teresa became well-known, she used her fame to speak against the taking of innocent life at all stages. In 1994, then President Bill Clinton invited her to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast, a pulpit from which she did not shrink, where she identified abortion as “the greatest destroyer of peace today…because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.”
Mother Teresa saw with a clarity something has become clouded in the West today: that a child is a person, no matter how young.
She was unabashed before a sitting President and First Lady who supported legalized abortion, adding:
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….
Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.
In abortion, she saw people harming one another for their own gain. She argued that by permitting murder in some circumstances, the basic goodness of human life is always undermined.
The reaction to her words was at first a silence as they struck the room. It was followed by an outburst of applause, though not from all. Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan who was a reporter in attendance that day, wrote,
The president and first lady, seated within a few feet of Mother Teresa on the dais, were not applauding. Nor were the vice president and Mrs. Gore. They looked like seated statues at Madame Tussaud’s. They glistened in the lights and moved not a muscle, looking at the speaker in a determinedly semi-pleasant way.
They were vocal proponents of abortion who sat, obviously constrained, as their honored guest inveighed their very own views.
Criticism
Such outright opposition to abortion and frank language from someone so-highly regarded offended modern sensibilities. Mother Teresa earned critics, notably from the late Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, a 58 year-old Indian physician. The former made a documentary against her called, “Hell’s Angel,” in which he rallied against her homes as a “cult of death and suffering,” places she used merely to advance her own “fundamentalist” beliefs. Chatterjee released his own book in 2003 criticizing the nun for sub-par conditions in her institutions and objecting to the slum-ridden reputation of Kolkata resulting from Western fascination with Mother Teresa. In 2013, the University of Montreal in Canada released a report reaffirming these points and also denounced “her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce.”
A balanced reader may infer that the objections made to Mother Teresa’s work tend to be objections that could be made of anyone who spends enough time in the public eye: “she didn’t do enough,” and “she did it for selfish reasons.” To those who claimed she merely celebrated the suffering of people in their final days, she gave men and women beds and care who would otherwise have been left alone on the streets.
Additionally, the allegations of “dogmatism” and “intention to proselytize,” pose the following dilemma. They assume that she and the Church are wrong on these issues and criticize her merely for holding them. In reality, if one believes in the eternal soul and its potential to suffer or be glorified after death, matters of sharing the Faith are of utmost importance. Her faith inspiring her work in no way invalidates it, as she helped people in this life regardless.
Natural Family Planning
Her remarks on abortion and Natural Family Planning further reveal an inner-consistency to her thought and also to Church teaching as a whole. It is little known that in 1979 Nobel prize speech, she also praised and elaborated on the practice of Natural Family Planning (NFP). She said: “We are teaching our beggars, our leprosy patients, our slum dwellers, our people of the street, natural family planning,” she said.
Natural means of birth regulation are effective and simple to teach:
And in Calcutta alone in six years – it is all in Calcutta – we have had 61,273 babies less from the families who would have had, but because they practise this natural way of abstaining, of self-control, out of love for each other.
We teach them the temperature meter which is very beautiful, very simple, and our poor people understand. And you know what they have told me? Our family is healthy, our family is united, and we can have a baby whenever we want.
She testified to the effectiveness of NFP, though it involves a break from Western reliance on artificial intervention: “So clear – those people in the street, those beggars – and I think that if our people can do like that how much more you and all the others who can know the ways and means without destroying the life that God has created in us.” There is no excuse for westerners, she proposes.
Further, NFP is consistent with the Church’s teachings on chastity and the importance of self-mastery: “The other day one of them came to thank and said: You people who have vowed chastity you are the best people to teach us family planning. Because it is nothing more than self-control out of love for each other.”
Mother Teresa’s remarks place natural family planning abstinence in continuity with the celibacy vows of priests and religious sisters and brothers. The Church calls all people to chastity, to integrate their desires with appropriate love of self and others.
Seen in the light of a consistent call to self-giving, her excoriation of abortion is not a “dogmatic” scourge upon women that her ideological detractors claim it to be, but a call to see the value of the person in a places, at all times, even within the womb. It is perhaps surprising that the nun renowned for caring for the aged and dying used her fame to speak for the other side of life, those still being made inside their mothers.
She saw the West as suffering from its own type of poverty, a poverty that could not see the value of human life. Her work and her words in their own ways testified to great worth she saw in each person, and she instructed those who would listen to do the same: “I want you to find the poor here, right in your own home first. And begin love there” (1979).
Stephanie Pacheco is a freelance writer and convert from Northern Virginia. She earned a M.A. in Theological Studies, summa cum laude, from Christendom College and holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia in Religious Studies with a minor in Government and Political Theory. Her work has been featured in America Magazine, Crisis Magazine, Soul Gardening Journal and syndicated by EWTN and Zenit. She blogs about making sense of the Catholic Faith in modern life at theoress.wordpress.com and lives with her husband and two young children.
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