Love and Charity

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everybody.  The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference toward one's neighbor who lives at the roadside assaulted by exploitation, corruption, poverty and disease.

As each one of this Society is to become a Co-Worker of Christ in the slums, each ought to understand what God and the Society expect from her.  Let Christ live and radiate his life in her, and through her in the slums.  Let the poor seeing her be drawn to Christ, and invite him to enter their lives and their homes.  Let the sick and the suffering find in her a real angel of comfort and consolation.  Let the little ones of the streets cling to her because she reminds them of him, the friend of the little ones.

Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself.  Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God the better because of them.

— Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910–1997)