When Mother Teresa Carpet Bombed Washington

I vaguely remember that Mother Teresa spoke to the National Prayer Breakfast. What I didn't realize was what she said and how she said it. Peggy Noonan's eye witness account Still, Small Voice made me think of one of God's prophets appearing. Mother Teresa didn't follow the standard speech giving "rules." No hand shaking or chatting or sitting on the dias with the powerful. No jokes or putting everyone at ease. Just saying what everyone needed to hear and not necessarily the way everyone wanted to hear it. Also surprising in that account is the reaction of those who didn't agree with her.

It was something, the silence and surprise with which her words were received. Perhaps she didn't know that we don't talk about birth control in speeches in America. Perhaps she didn't know, or care, that her words were, as they say, not "healing" but “divisive," dividing not only Protestant from Catholic but Catholic from Catholic. It was all so unhappily unadorned, explicit, impolitic. And it was wonderful, like a big fresh drink of water, bracing in its directness and its uncompromising tone.

And of course it was startling, too, as if someone had spoken in favor of the Volsted Act (ed. note: Prohibition). And indeed the Clintons and Gores looked, by the end, as if they’d heard someone promise to outlaw Merlot.

And Mother Teresa seemed neither to notice nor to care. She finished her speech to a standing ovation and left as she had entered, silently, through a parted curtain, in a flash of blue and white.

Read the entire speech for yourself. Both it and Noonan's article are classics. Via Being or Nothingness.