In her keynote address at the National Prayer Breakfast last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke openly about Mother Theresa’s 1994 prayer breakfast speech when she condemned abortion. After the address, Mother Theresa told Clinton she should start a home for babies, which Clinton said she accomplished after cutting through some red tape. Here’s how Clinton told the story:
We began to talk, and she told me that she knew that we had a shared conviction about adoption being vastly better as a choice for unplanned or unwanted babies. And she asked me – or more properly, she directed me – to work with her to create a home for such babies here in Washington. I know that we often picture, as we’re growing up, God as a man with a white beard. But that day, I felt like I had been ordered, and that the message was coming not just through this diminutive woman but from someplace far beyond.
…Finally, the moment came: June, 1995, and the Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children opened. She flew in from Kolkata to attend the opening, and like a happy child, she gripped my arm and led me around, looking at the bassinets and the pretty painted colors on the wall, and just beaming about what this meant for children and their futures.
World magazine reporter Emily Belz tried to track down the Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children and found that it no longer exists.
According to a pastor at the church next door to the home’s former location, the adoption ministry failed to take off because the Roman Catholic nuns who ran it weren’t allowed to care for babies without medical personnel on site. “I’m not sure the legal thing that came down upon them, but they realized they needed to expend their energies in another way,” said Maureen Freshour, who along with her husband, David, pastors Chevy Chase Baptist Church and lives nearby. Freshour has stayed in touch with the nuns from the Missionaries of Charity order who ran the home and said that the remaining three or four sisters have moved to another house in Washington, where they are ministering to the homeless.
