EDITORIAL

Going postal over Mother Teresa

The Catholic Sun | Feb. 18, 2010

Blessed Mother Teresa, known by just about everyone for her humanitarian work on behalf of the poor, the sick and the helpless, is among the subjects featured on U.S. stamps this year.

The 44-cent stamp bearing the likeness of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner will be available on Aug. 26, which would have been her 100th birthday.

“Mother Teresa, a diminutive Roman Catholic nun and honorary U.S. citizen, served the sick and destitute of India and the world for nearly 50 years. Her humility and compassion, as well as her respect for the innate worth and dignity of humankind, inspired people of all ages and backgrounds to work on behalf of the world’s poorest populations,” the U.S. Postal Service said in a news release.

According to the U.S. Postal Service Web site, a committee recommends subjects that they determine would be of broad national interest and consistent with public opinion.

But not everyone is happy with this saintly selection. An outfit known as the Freedom from Religion Foundation is raising objections to her inclusion in the 2010 stamp program. Leave it to an atheist organization to be out of touch with public opinion.

The foundation, apparently sticklers for U.S. Postal regulations, is urging a boycott of the stamp as well as encouraging a tasteless letter-writing campaign against the beloved nun because, they claim, the selection committee violated its own rules: “Stamps or stationery items shall not be issued to honor religious institutions or individuals whose principal achievements are associated with religious undertakings or beliefs.”

For its part, the U.S. Postal Service responded that it is honoring the woman and humanitarian, not the Catholic Church.

In a recent interview with FoxNews.com, Freedom from Religion Foundation spokeswoman Annie Laurie Gaylor said, “Mother Teresa is principally known as a religious figure who ran a religious institution. You can’t really separate her being a nun and being a Roman Catholic from everything she did.”

In a sense, she’s right on that one point. As Catholics, we’re called to live our faith in all that we do. We hear it a lot these days when talking about Catholic politicians and their voting records, but it applies to all of us. It even applies to an Albanian-born woman who spent more than 45 years of her life in service to the world’s poorest, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Gold Medal.

The point is, Blessed Mother Teresa fully deserves to be commemorated with this new stamp, and it’s ridiculous for this atheist group to object so vehemently because she was a Catholic nun.

But at the heart of the protest may just be a darker motivation, one that doesn’t agree with the late nun’s pro-life convictions. In the same interview with FoxNews.com, Gaylor was quoted as characterizing Mother Teresa’s well-known Nobel Prize acceptance speech as an “anti-abortion rant.”

According to Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, Gaylor’s desire to stamp out Mother Teresa is born out of her pro-abortion beliefs.

Her mother, Annie Nicol Gaylor, founded the Freedom from Religion Foundation in 1978. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion, she released a book titled “Abortion is a Blessing.”

“This is not the kind of book that someone who is reluctantly pro-choice writes,” Donohue said, “it could only be written by someone who sees abortion as a positive good. Looks like the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”

Additionally, the Freedom from Religion Foundation didn’t seem to mind past stamps featuring Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, a leader of the Nation of Islam, or Fr. Edward Flanagan, a Catholic priest who founded Boys Town, arguably the most famous orphanage.

We encourage Catholics to go out and buy these stamps when they become available in honor of Blessed Mother Teresa for her world-changing humanitarian work. And if you’re looking to make a difference in the lives of others, even if it’s just a small one, go ahead and send a letter to your atheist or anti-life friends with the saintly sister attached. Think of it as continuing her work here on earth.