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GREAT COMMUNICATION SECRETS OF GREAT LEADERS
TRUE TO HER BELIEFS
Those from the secular world found Mother Teresa a holy individual, but
many of them did not agree with her doctrinaire support of the Church’s posi-
tion on contraception and abortion. Mother Teresa did not turn them away.
Similarly, she accepted an award from dictator Baby Doc Duvalier of Haiti
and laid a wreath at the tomb of Enver Hoxha, the communist tyrant of Alba-
nia. Critics assailed her. Mother Teresa was not bothered. She “saw Christ in
them, and believed they could be redeemed.” 11
DEEPLY HUMAN
For all the talk of Mother Teresa’s saintliness, she also was very human. In
excerpts from her diaries published after her death, we see a woman who is
more like us—plagued by doubts. “In my soul, I feel just the terrible pain of
loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.”
Those words were from a journal she kept between 1959 and 1960, when she
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was urged by her confessor to keep a record of her thoughts. Thirty years later,
she seems much more at ease. “I have begun to love my darkness, for I believe
now that is a part, a very small part, of Jesus’darkness and pain on earth.” 13
Mother Teresa writes eloquently of love as a healing force and how it is
necessary to love others in order to heal their physical afflictions. She also
writes of the joy of giving, doing it for love, not for duty. “God loves a joyful
giver. . . . A joyful heart is a normal result of a heart burning with love. Joy is
strength.” 14
And as befits someone who is in tune with herself and with others,
Mother Teresa had a good sense of humor. She writes: “Someone once asked
me, ‘Are you married?’And I said, ‘Yes, and I find it sometimes very difficult
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to smile at Jesus because He can be very demanding.’” Likewise she joked
in her Nobel speech, “If I don’t go to heaven for anything else I will be going
for all the publicity [which has] made me really ready to go to heaven.” 16

WORK CONTINUES
The greatest legacy of a leader is the continuation of his or her work after he
or she has passed from the scene. In the year following Mother Teresa’s death,
the Missionaries of Charity added some 20 new centers. Her successor, Sister
Nirmala, accounted for the growth this way: “It’s God’s work. If it was
Mother’s work, maybe in the course of time it would [have ceased], but since
it’s God’s work, it is the same.” 17
Whether God has anything to do with it is an eternal question. What there
can be no question about is this: It is the example of Mother Teresa that con-
tinues to bring the poor to her missions and to draw people who are commit-
ted to serving them as she herself did.