World's Saddest Thing

Mother Teresa, the Albanian nun who founded the Sisters of Charity to care for the poor of Calcutta, India, must have seen just about every kind of evil and suffering during her lifetime of works of mercy for the poor and sick of India.

"What's the worst evil in the world?" an interviewer asked her.

The diminutive nun's stentorian answer resonates to this day and still causes an embarrassed silence among guilt-crippled priests and popes. Her viewpoint squares exactly with the teachings of the fathers of the early Church.

It was Fr George Rutler who related the story about Mother Teresa in his Good Friday 1989 sermon at St Agnes Church, New York.

"Suddenly I found myself asking her, I don't know why, Mother, what do you think is the worst problem in the world today? She more than anyone could have named any number of candidates: famine, plague, disease, the breakdown of the family, rebellion against God, the corruption of the media, world debt, nuclear threat, and so on.

"Without pausing for a second she said, Wherever I go in the whole world, the thing that makes me the saddest is watching people receive Communion in the hand."

Communion in the hand is worse than desecration of the Host by Satanists. In that it is carried out against the person and body of the Lord by his own people and his own priests in his own holy place, the churches of the whole world.

You cannot insult the Prince of Peace and then expect blessings of peace. People are always praying for peace in the world and families and there is no peace. Why does God seem to be not listening?

The answer was given by Mother Teresa. "The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace."

Peace comes from order, order from justice, justice from mercy, mercy from grace, grace from right worship, and right worship from reverent silence, the very thing reformers abolished in their modernised churches. But "let all mortal flesh keep silence" says the hymn by St Francis of Assisi.

The Apostle James wrote something similar: "The fruit of justice is sown in peace, to them that make peace. From where are wars and contentions among you? Are they not here, from your concupiscences, which war in your members? You covet and have not. You kill and envy and cannot obtain. You contend and war and you have not, because you ask not. You ask and you receive not, because you ask amiss, that you may consume it in your concupiscences." Concupiscence means luxury or tendency to sin.

In 1963 the nuns in Mother Teresa’s convent started making a Holy Hour each week. 10 years later they started making the Holy Hour daily. Then her religious order began to grow and blossom. By the time of her death, she had hundreds of convents around the world and thousands in the order taking care of the poor.