Mother Theresa's Answer

A simple woman named Mother Teresa was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in Calcutta among members of India's lowest caste. She cannot save all India, so she seeks the least redeemable, the dying. When she finds them, in the gutters and garbage dumps of Calcutta's alleys, she brings them to her hospital and surrounds them with love. Smiling women daub at their sores, clean off layers of grime, and swaddle them in soft sheets. The beggars, often too weak to talk, start wide-eyed at this seemingly misdirected love offered so late in their lives. Have they died and gone to heaven? Why this sudden outpouring of care — why the warm, strengthening broth beting gently spooned to their mouths? 

A newsman in New York — properly outfitted in a three-piece suit, taking cues from an off-camera TelePrompter — confronted Mother Teresa with a similar line of questioning. He seemed pleased with his acerbic probing. Why indeed should she expend her limited resources on people for whom there was no hope? Why not attend to people worthy of rehabilitation? What kind of success rate could her hospital boast of when most of its patients died in a matter of days or weeks? Mother Teresa stared at him in silence, absorbing the questions, trying to pierce through the facade to discern what kind of a man would ask them. She had no answers that would make sense to him, so she said softly, "The people have been treated all their lives like dogs. Their greatest disease is a sense that they are unwanted. Don't they have the right to die like angels?"