[Salvation]

Mother Teresa of Calcutta would have never succumbed to the life of a politician. She served the poor and God, only.

[mlizzy]

"America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts -- a child -- as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters, and, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign" (Mother Theresa -- "Notable and Quotable," Wall Street Journal, 2/25/94, p. A14).

[cmj328]

There have been many canonized Catholic saints who served like Mother Theresa, and only a few who have served like Thomas More, Louis IX, Garcia Moreno, Elizabeth of Hungary, Baldwin IV, Edward the Confessor, etc.

But Mother Theresa would have voted, and that's what we have to concern ourselves with. There may be no saints on the ballot (at least not yet), or there may even be one but who is incapable of getting elected. We are given a vote and we have to exercise it prudently and justly in order to "make" ourselves saints.