David Scott is currently associate of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, a contributing editor of Godspy.com, and a former editor of Our Sunday Visitor. He sees this book not as a systematic study, a critical biography, or an inquest, but rather as a series of meditations on the life and times of Mother Teresa (1910-1997). Noting that Catholics envision humanity as a single world family loving one another and God, he calls her the first saint of the global village who showed us how far the world was from that ideal, "a world cleaved apart by blood and class, caste and creed, a world that fixed an impassable gulf between those who have too much and those who have nothing at all. She showed us a world in which people don't matter, especially the weak: the baby in the womb, the poor, the sick and the old."
Mother Teresa was a cradle Catholic who was raised in a pious home and went off at the age of 18 to be a nun in the missions in India. Years later she was riding on a train and heard Jesus ask her to serve the poor.
"The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one's neighbor who lives at the roadside assaulted by exploitation, corruption and disease," said Mother Teresa. The words could have been spoken by Dorothy Day as well. Both of these extraordinary Catholic women wanted us to see in the poor the presence of Christ in all of his loneliness and distress. Scott notes: "For more than a half century, Mother Teresa ran an international school of revolutionary love, using the poor as our teachers. 'Only in heaven will we see how much we owe the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.' " While many others in the Catholic hierarchy avoided speaking of such matters, Mother Teresa criticized the arms race in Third World countries as a theft from the poor. She also spoke out against the gap between the very rich and the down-and-out.
Scott gives us a rounded and a revealing portrait of this servant of the poor whose life is a model of compassionate and selfless love.
