Catholic culture warrior Bill Donohue in his stunning little powerhouse of a book, "Unmasking Mother Teresa's Critics," shows how the saint of Calcutta and her fellow nuns once encountered four people from the streets who were so sick and poor they were hovering on death's edge.
Mother Teresa, who is to be canonized Sunday, told the other nuns to care for three of the victims, and chose to comfort herself the one whose condition was most dire and was suffering the most.
She had the woman taken to a bed. She offered her whatever ministrations were possible given the little time the poor woman had left.
"I put her to bed," Mother Teresa would later recall, "and there was such a beautiful smile on her face.
"She took hold of my hand, as she said one word only: 'Thank you.' And she died."
Mother Teresa never winced at providing care and comfort to humanity at its lowest, most desperate, most forgotten. And yet as Donohue relates, she believed the downtrodden and dispossessed offered powerful lessons to the rest of us.
"The poor people are very great people," she said. "They can teach us so many beautiful things."
Beautiful indeed.
And as difficult as it is to believe in retrospect, she was also the target of vicious attacks from secularists, skeptics, and atheists who sensed in the tiny nun a powerful force that threatened their worldview as if it were a great edifice built on a foundation of sand.
In a recent Newsmax TV interview, Donohue explains why:
"Because in the mind of the radical socialist," said the longtime president and CEO of the Catholic League, "helping the destitute is the job of the state and the state alone."
As Donohue explains in his book, contrary to myth it was never Mother Teresa's view that the state had no place in aiding the ill and impoverished. Rather, she believed that the disadvantaged also deserved a helping hand to "the least of these" that came from their fellow citizens, neighbors, and community members.
Thus when one head of state regaled Teresa with accounts of that nation's robust social-welfare safety net, the soon-to-be-canonized Teresa remarked: "Yes, but do they do it with love?"
For decades now no one in the cultural arena has more passionately fought back against the culture's growing cloud of secularism more effectively in Donohue.
His book offers a powerful apologetic of the good works of Mother Teresa, and swats away her secularist critics, who included the likes of the late Christopher Hitchens and Aroup Chatterjee, among others. Yet he does so without ever lapsing into the sort of bitter, personal attacks his opponents used to level at Mother Teresa.
Donohue explains: "When they see private, voluntary effort, outreach efforts for the destitute – particularly when that is coming from a Christ-centered person – that's a threat and an obstacle and a deterrent."
At the turn of the millennium, the Gallup organization conducted a survey whose object was to identify the most admired person of the 20th century. The names included great statesmen, political leaders, people of great wealth, geniuses and heroes of every calling.
But the winner was none of them. Rather, a meek and humble nun from Calcutta, Mother Teresa, was chosen as the most admired figure of her century.
History had pronounced its verdict. Mother Teresa had won the last word.