- The Catholic Thing - https://www.thecatholicthing.org -

Mother Teresa

versus Christopher Hitchens.

"While Christianity may indeed have multiplied soup kitchens, it never confused happiness with the absence of hunger pains. Truer to say that while modern compassion seeks to eliminate suffering, Christianity, recognizing its inevitablility for mortal and sinful beings, sought to make it meaningful. It sought to teach us to grasp it as that suffering in and with Christ on which salvation ultimately depends. When, then, Christopher Hitchens excoriated the late Mother Teresa for not being a true "humanitarian" at all, he was perfectly correct: she could not be a mere humanitarian because (as she made no secret) she strove to be a true Christian."

Clifford Orwin
How an Emotion Became a Virtue: It Took Some Help from Rousseau and Montesquieu
In Character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues