On December 1st we set out on the path to Christmas, making this the happiest time of the year. This flower-strewn path leads to Bethlehem, which in Hebrew means “House of Bread.” In Bethlehem there lies a delightful House of Bread, a bright home in which we are fed at St. Joseph’s table, comforted by Mother Mary and charmed by the baby Jesus, the Bread of Life. Bethlehem has inspired all kinds of holiday breads, from gingerbread houses to cinnamon rolls, Yule logs and sugar cookies with green and red sprinkles, mince pies and fruitcakes, Christmas pinwheels and sweet potato dinner rolls, not to mention figgy pudding. Christmas is the happiest time of the year because food is love, and we are happiest when good food made by loving hands surrounds us.
 
Christianity is a religion of food. Its original sin was to eat of a forbidden fruit, and its Founder commanded us to “eat and drink in memory of me.” Our fundamental act of worship is to consume bread which has become His Body. We attain mystical communion with God and each other by partaking of consecrated bread and wine. Today I am 63 years old, and an aging man asks himself what he has done with his life. The answer came at morning Mass: I was born to feed the “little birds” who line up at the alar rail for the Body and the Blood each morning. A man is a fundamentally a breadwinner, putting bread and meat on the table. Blessed is the man called to put the Bread of Life on God’s table. Thank you, dear Savior, for my vocation to the priesthood! Thank you, dear God, for my brother priests, and for all the children of the New Israel who hunger for the Bread of eternal life. Thank you for my dear parishioners, who kneel at the edge of the sanctuary every day to be fed by the hand of God.
 
The other day I cycled by San Francisco’s bison herd in Golden Gate Park, which seems to be growing. After the 1906 earthquake the number of bison was increased, it is said, to provide an emergency food source for the city should supply lines break down again. But how many people would 12 bison feed, and for how long, if it came to that? During Covid many worried that food delivery systems would break down, and going hungry is never far from any of our minds. In 1968, Paul Erlich’s book The Population Bomb predicted that hundreds of millions would starve from worldwide food shortages in the 1970s. Will we ever have a safe and secure food source?
 
The fact is, even the most substantial food doesn’t sustain us for long. We have to eat again after a few hours. What we really need is supersubstantial food. This morning, in fact, I gave 30 people “food that lasts….” Having fed 5000 men with more than they could eat, Jesus told them not to work for “food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.”
 
They say religion is coming back to San Francisco. Apparently my fair city has lost its title of “America’s most secular city” to Seattle, and even Big Tech is beginning to realize what Steve Jobs has always known: an Apple device is helpful but not enough. Many newcomers to my parish are truly San Francisco foodies (how wonderful when they invite me to their favorite restaurants!), but they are pouring into Star of the Sea for something more. They want that supersubstantial bread that they’ve been hearing about.

The day before the Thanksgiving…. the City is quiet. Most people in San Francisco have “gone home” for the holiday, while those who are at home in the City of St. Francis are off work because everyone else is off work. I love this city when it is quiet, but “quiet” and “city” are by definition oxymoronic. Cities are places of great activity, and that can be a very good thing.
 
This morning I read Genesis 11, the story of Babel. I have always thought of Babel as a tower, but actually it was an entire city. “Come,” the people said, “let us build ourselves a town….” Within that town was a tower, “reaching to heaven,” by which, the people said, “let us make a name for ourselves.” Most of us want to live in cities because cities give us an identity and a status above “flyover state” people. A certain amount of pride motivated me to move back to San Francisco from a country parish.
 
Genesis 11 continues: “Now Yahweh came down to see the town and the tower that the sons of man had built.” You can picture Father Yahweh walking the streets of Babel, humming to himself, looking into alleyways and up at the great towers, shielding his eyes against the glare. And you know the story: God humbles the pride of this city by confusing their language. Ever since Babel, we have been struggling to communicate between over 7000 global languages.
 
A few decades ago some clever people invented One Language to Bind them All. They called it “Esperanto,” but it never caught on. In San Francisco we all speak English, more or less. But we don’t really speak the same language. Those of us who studied “logic” and “grammar” and “history” in school can’t really communicate with those who never learned these basic tools of human discourse. The language I learned in college uses the concepts of “true” and “false,” “right” and “wrong,” but these words don’t translate for folks who went to college after the 90’s, when relativism became the in-thing. We speak different languages.
 
I went into Target yesterday to buy some socks. Most of the clothing in the store was locked behind glass cabinets because in San Francisco you can steal up to $1000 and the City does not define "stealing" as a crime. Because of the increased cost of all those cabinets, and the extra employees needed to continually unlock them for customers, and because of the beefy security guards needed at all the doors, and because of the vast sums lost through legalized shoplifting, the price of socks has doubled. And it takes me twice as long to get them from behind those locked cabinets.
 
If I say to the younger generation who are running our city, “stealing is wrong,” I will be met with a blank stare. “Stealing,” I will be told, is merely a culturally-conditioned concept, probably invented by a colonial patriarchy. “Stealing” is only wrong for certain races of people, at certain times in history. “This is what we were taught in university,” they will tell me, “and it is certain.” But of course, we are told further, there is nothing absolutely "certain" in life. There is only ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth.’ Which means, in the end, there is only “power.”
 
In the current dictatorship of relativism, we all speak different languages, with mutually-exclusive concepts and lots of self-contradiction. There is no such thing as biological gender, we are told, unless of course you need sex-specific medical treatment or belong to the #MeeToo movement. We have been confused in our speech and in our thought patterns. The City, and its bright tower, will never “reach up to heaven” under these circumstances....
 
But today is also the Feast of the Miraculous Medal. Our Lady appeared to St. Catherine Laboure on Rue du Bac in Paris on this day in 1830, and she gave her a medal to wear. My mother put a sterling silver copy of that medal on me in 1968, and I’ve never taken it off. And I’m hoping it will lead me all the way to heaven, where I will live in a bright and beautiful city forever!

Seven years ago my spiritual director suggested I read a chapter of the Bible every morning, and I’ve been doing that. Six months ago, however, I finished the Bible (for the third time!) and began reading other things in the morning. I read a spiritual biography of St. John of the Cross, and a commentary on St. John’s Gospel—all good spiritual reading, but there is nothing to compare with the Good Book itself. So last week I opened the large Bible that I keep open on my mantlepiece. I had purchased this Bible in 1983 from the Daughters of St. Paul when they had a store on Geary at Market, just down from Macy’s. I bought it for ten dollars, and I’ve read it cover to cover four times now. After purchasing it, I would pour through the words, chapter by chapter, every day after work. I would read every footnote and  make  my own marginal notes, I would study the introductions to each of its 63 books, and I took delight in gazing over the colored maps in the appendix, dreaming of one day exploring the Holy Land myself. I’ve taken this Bible with me to Oxford, Rome, and New York as a student of theology. I’ve carried it with me to every one of my seven priestly assignments, from Stockton to Los Angeles to San Francisco and had it rebound twice with leather reinforcements. When I first began reading it at age 22, I felt like I was falling in love. I declared: “I am going to marry the Bible!” This Bible and I have been with each other for 41 years now, and I’ve just returned to my daily morning reading, a chapter a day. There is no reading like the Scriptures, truly our “daily bread.”

Last week I began again with Genesis, Chapter One. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth….” Those words declare the fullness of our joy, our faith, our wonderous beauty. We did not make ourselves, and we do not have to save ourselves. We have been fearfully, wonderfully made, and we are saved at every moment by a loving God who dwells beyond the heavens. There have been many attempts at atheism over the centuries. The Chinese Communist Party, for example, is attempting to build a society on absolute “faith” in the Chinese Communist Party. Russia tried to build a society on a similar “atheism,” and when the first Soviet cosmonaut rocketed past earth’s atmosphere into outer space, he reported (apparently seriously) that he had gone to heaven and did not see God there. Our country is tending toward a similar kind of mentality, wanting to expunge “in God we trust” from our dollar bills in favor of “in the government we trust” or “in technology we trust.” It’s hard to say where American society will be in fifty years, but one thing is historically certain: every society that has traded faith in God for faith in anything less has ended badly.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, but He Himself dwells beyond the heavens. He created the heavens and the earth in six days (so to speak) and on the seventh day he rested. He declared the seventh day “holy,” a day to gaze on all the good that He had created and to “rest.” That Seventh Day is heaven itself, to which Sunday points. All our political unrest, and our personal anxieties, will someday come to an end, either by the end of the World or by our own death, whichever comes sooner. In this holy month of November, we think on the death of this world, and we fix our sights on the Seventh Day, now the “Eighth Day,” when the dead shall rise, and we will enter into that perfect rest with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Fr. Joseph Illo

 ​Welcome to November, and a blessed feast of All Saints! November is becoming my favorite month because of the feasts of All Saints and All Souls. The older I get, the more clearly I perceive the Life of the World to Come, and the more I long to join the vast numbers who have crossed over the waters of death ahead of me. They now live within a joy we cannot possibly imagine.
 
But, truth to tell, we have “miles to go before we sleep” (Robert Frost, despite his human limitations, is still one of my favorite poets). We still have work here on earth, among which is ordering our lives together. We must work to be “united states,” which is working against a strong headwind these days. That which unites people is a power higher than themselves, and Americans have come to imagine we are the work of our own hands. Left to ourselves, we will destroy each other. Only if we understand ourselves as children of a beneficent Father in Heaven can we stop bickering and attacking each other.
 
I want to vote for Jesus Christ for president, but alas He didn’t make it past the primaries. I want to vote for the saints: Teresa of Avila for Mayor of San Francisco, Elizabeth Seton for President of San Francisco Unified School District, Pier Giorgio Frassati for Governor of California, and Gregory the Great for President of the United States. Alas, none of them has thrown in their hats. We must, tragically, vote for lesser leaders. But those we vote for must be in some measure “saints”—those most likely to acknowledge “the laws of nature and of Nature’s God” (from the first lines of our Declaration of Independence).
 
If you haven’t voted yet, I remind you that voting is a Catholic duty, and voting for the candidate most likely to promote Gospel principles is also a Catholic duty. I hear from many people their anxiety and depression, even their panic, at our steeply worsening political situation. I give the same advice to everyone: stop watching the news. It’s designed by very smart individuals to keep us in fear. Of course, the media industry sensationalizes everything as clickbait, to make money on our “fear of missing out.” But keeping people in fear is easily used by darker intentions to keep us securely within their control. Terror has always been the weapon of choice for totalitarian power, from Nazis to Soviets to Islamicists. If I can keep you in fear, I can keep you in my control, especially if you believe that “only I can save you.”
 
We Catholics certainly do believe that “only I can save you,” but that “I” is not CNN or the federal government or the tech industry. Only God can save us, and the farther we walk from God the worse it gets for all of us. Only Jesus Christ can save us, and he does so not through terror, but through love. So, dear people, do not be afraid. Only He can save us, and He will! No political collapse can undo His will. In the end, the most powerful on earth will die, but the Word of God will remain.
 
So stop watching “the news,” and keep your eyes on the Good News. Read the Scriptures, and read the lives of the saints, and read good classic literature, not the scare tactics of the enemy. Not even Kamala Harris, not even Donald Trump, and not even George Soros or Bill Gates is stronger than God. We are in the almighty and loving hands of God, so let’s stay there, and refuse to be frightened.

I wasn’t going to write a blog today, but the sound of hatred assaulted my ears this morning. On the street outside my window a motorcycle rider was blasting rap music that could be heard for three blocks in any direction. I guess he thought we needed to hear this expression of anger (toward whom or for what we know not). All of us hear “rap” music, or other expressions of anger, throughout the day from people’s devices. Anger not only assaults our ears, but our eyes. Here in San Francisco, we have been paying for a public service announcement on billboards and bus stop signs over the last 12 months: an angry black man looking down on us with these words “tear the paper ceiling.” Tear. Break. Destroy. Condemn. Cancel. That is what we are told we must do. The ad itself promotes a nonprofit doing the praiseworthy work of finding jobs for underserved people, but it uses anger to deliver its message. By the way, who is paying for this angry ad plastered on thousands of signs around our city?
 
Not long ago, on a beautiful morning, I said hello to a young black man in the park. No response. I said “good morning” again and heard only angry silence. Then I got angry. “I said ‘good morning’ to you!” He turned to me with threatening hatred: “if you say one more F-ing thing to me ….” How did he get so angry? How did I get so angry?
 
In the original Star Wars saga, Luke Skywalker enters into mortal combat with Darth Vader. He discovers at that point that Darth is his father, and he feels helpless rage rising within him. A “presence” behind both Luke and his father (the evil emperor) smiles wickedly as son and father fight each other. “Feel the anger, Luke,” the emperor tells him. “Give in to your hatred!” But Luke resists the anger, and that is why he is the hero of the original Star Wars legend.
 
Let us be clear that hatred is from the evil one, who is also known as diabolus, or “he who divides.” Those who promote anger are in the service of this Satanas, which means “the accuser” or “he who condemns.” It’s a wicked thing to play rap music, and public service ads promoting anger destroy goodwill. They do not promote justice, but only destruction.
 
For those Catholics who think condemnation, anger, and division are acts of “social justice,” think again. Think on the only Savior who came “not to condemn the world.” Be very clear from whence the anger comes: not from any good person, but from a very bad person. Let us commit ourselves to resisting these calls to anger and hatred, and to working for true justice, which always begins with a smile, not a frown. It looks up (to God), not down (on people). 

Last Sunday at 3pm, as six Blue Angel F18 jets roared above our church towers for San Francisco's Fleet Week, I baptized the sixth Moeck baby, Thomas Leo. In a memorable photograph of that event, reproduced here, you will see God’s glory in a Christian family: six children, each of them fascinating, with Mom and Dad smiling benignly. Grandma, as babysitter-in-chief, looks into the camera but with two hands on the grandchildren and a worried look that one of them might spin out of control. But each of these children is a masterpiece of divine grace. Abigail, the oldest, manifests a maternal serenity, then down the line: John (notice the untied right shoelace) seems confident as oldest male (notice also the scholarly spectacles); Caleb looks confidentially into the camera with his Brooks Brothers tie and shirt (untucked however); Catherine the Sanguine Extrovert slightly smiles because she already has a project in mind that you don’t know about; Teresa with her tongue stuck out at just the right moment has just been ousted as the Baby Queen of the family; and finally the newborn, Thomas, looking up to heaven, whence he came and wither he goes. The priest has blinked, oblivious to his crooked stole.

​In this decidedly anti-natalist culture, the Moeck family has forged ahead with God’s first commandment, “have as many children as fast as possible!” (AKA “be fruitful and multiply”). God commanded that of our first parents, not only because He loves children, but because he loves their parents, the best thing of which in their entire lives is to love and be loved by many offspring. We have been lied to, and not by God Almighty. “Someone” has been telling us fruitfulness is a failure, and babies are a blight. My own parents had six children, but the Moecks are set to surpass my venerable forebears. I can testify that we six sibs were ingredient in keeping Dad and Mom together, more or less happily, for 68 years. As difficult as marriage can be, we are better together. Nowhere are people more “together” than in the family, and especially in the large Catholic family. Thanks be to God, I can easily count fifteen other families in our parish who are defying the dictate that more than two children is “unsustainable” and “irresponsible.” Almost every woman I know who has had more than two children has been harassed, belittled, and pressured to sterilize herself by at least one attending physician and more than one friend or family member. God reward them for defying the naysayers! When friends would balk at my cousin’s seven beautiful children, she would line them up and ask “now you tell me: which one should I not have had?” 

Men are not too good at remembering anniversaries, which are essentially relationships. Women, naturally relational, are much better at it. Remembering the day of someone’s birth or wedding or death is an act of communion with a person, transcending time and space.
 
Today is the third anniversary of my mother’s death, and the women of the parish began reminding me about a week ago. One arranged a Mass for her today; one reminded me by email yesterday; this morning another woman gave me a drawing of my mother and me that her daughter had sketched from an old photograph.
 
I’ve been offering my rosaries and Masses for Mom since she died on September 26, 2021, and for Dad since he died on May 21, 2023. Last February I was on a beach at sunset and sat on a dune to pray a rosary for my mother. In my teenage years, Mom and I would go to the garden after dinner to watch the sun go down over South Mountain while we prayed the rosary. After finishing my rosary at the beach, I strongly sensed Mom speaking to me. “Thank you, Joe, for all the Masses and rosaries. I don’t need them anymore, but I give them out to those who do, especially for your father.”
 
At Mass today we begin the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Qoheleth. “Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities!  All things are vanity!” He means that nothing on earth lasts, and nothing here below has any real substance apart from the Good God who created it. “All rivers go to the sea,” he continues, “yet never does the sea become full. To the place where they go, the rivers keep on going.” Life is a river that flows on with or without us, taking us to the place we must end up, to “the sea,” a symbol of the infinite and the eternal. We came from God, and we are returning to God.
 
My mother patiently sustained various physical ailments throughout her life, like many who went through the Great Depression. For example, after my grandfather’s business failed in 1933, he drank himself to death, and the family was plunged into penury. Mom’s widowed mother could not afford to provide milk for the table, so my mother suffered osteoporosis most of her life. During one particularly difficult illness, I asked Mom if she found her life too difficult. “Certainly not!” she exclaimed. “Life is about much more than health!” On the eve of her last day on earth she said “they tell me I’m dying, but I sure don’t feel like I’m dying!”
 
Mom loved St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. In 1997 I took a large group of young people to Thérèse’s basilica in Lisieux, where she is buried. At one altar a photograph of her in death quotes her last words: Je ne meurs pas; j’entre dans la vie. “I am not dying; I am entering into life.” I distinctly smelled roses at that altar, and I lost my fear of death on that day. In July I was back in Lisieux with a group, and again I smelled the roses as I passed her tomb. There she is again! I thought to myself.
 
My hope is say the same words my mother said as she lay dying: I sure don’t feel like I’m dying! 
​

​On the plane to Calcutta last week I read a book on the Concentration Camp of Dachau, and on the plane back I watched a movie on Auschwitz. While in Calcutta, I went to Mother Teresa’s famous Home for Dying Destitutes, “Kalighat” (it was a BBC documentary called Something Beautiful for God, filmed in Kalighat, that gained Mother Teresa worldwide recognition in 1969). Dachau, Auschwitz, and Kalighat all look pretty much the same: skeletal men in rags languishing in gray concrete buildings. The fundamental difference between them, however, is the presence of God. Love suffuses Kalighat like the morning sun, while a frightening darkness oppresses the concentration camps. At Kalighat, the BBC crew said in 1969 that filming in such dark conditions would not work, but producer Malcom Muggeridge later wrote how an unexplained light shone in the film, what he called the first recorded “miracle on celluloid.”   
 
Some think that one day Mother Teresa will be declared a doctor of the Church like her patron saint, Therese of Lisieux. Saints do not repeat each other, but they often rhyme. Both Mother Teresa and St. Therese had little formal education but a wisdom far beyond most scholars; both taught how even the simplest souls can reach perfection by doing "small things with great love," both attracting a worldwide popularity beyond most celebrities.
 
History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Much like Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1933, we are again falling into totalitarianism. The powers gaining control today do not look like Marxist Communism or National Socialism, but the means of control are same: suppression of information and free speech “for the good of the people.” The technology used to stifle dissent is new, but the result is the same. “Social cancelation” has replaced a bullet to the head, and “virtual concentration camps” have replaced brick and mortar camps, but dissent is again silenced by the ruling party.
 
To know what’s happening today, we need to know what happened yesterday. I recommend the book on Dachau, The Priest Barracks, and the movie on Auschwitz, The Zone of Interest. Both portray what actually happened, and is happening again, although the book is Catholic and the movie is not. Ironically, the movie, while portraying Nazi totalitarianism, falls captive to the feminist dictates our own totalitarianism: the film contains good and bad female characters, but all the male characters are bad!
 
Better than the book on Dachau or the movie on Auschwitz, however, is a good book on Mother Teresa (I recommend Something Beautiful for God by Malcom Muggeridge). Mother Teresa went through 50 years of interior darkness, of feeling unwanted and even “hated” by God, but she never lost her faith. "Jesus in my heart," she taught her sisters to pray, "I believe in your tender love for me. I love you." Soviet Communism and German Socialism, considering themselves “enlightened,” brought a terrible darkness to their Christian nations. Mother Teresa, knowing her own darkness in humility, brough an extraordinary light to her non-Christian nation.
 
On my last day in Calcutta I decided to walk to the famous Howrah Bridge on the Hooghly River, a seven mile round trip through exceedingly crowded sidewalks and streets. I passed at least one hundred individuals every minute, looking on the faces of over 13,000 people during my 130 minute brisk walk. Each of those ten thousand individuals was unique, beautiful, and precious to God. Mother Teresa taught us that every person is infinitely good because every person is Jesus. “What you did for least of my brothers” (she quoted Jesus), “you did to me.” Beginning to believe in His "tender love for me," I can begin to love Him in return, and I can begin to love every last human person on our teeming planet. With that love, Auschwitz becomes Kalighat, a place of radiant love rather than a place of dark despair. 

Calcutta is sometimes called "The City of Joy," and I wonder why. When Mother Teresa began her work here in 1948 (the year George Orwell wrote his book "1984"), Calcutta had been flooded with refugees from the Indian War of Partition and the Bengali Famine, both consequences of the Second World War. Calcutta, like Port-au-Prince or Beruit today, had suffered an almost total collapse of its social order. And yet, something about its teeming streets made it the City of Joy, and not only in a darkly ironic sense. The people of the city had learned to live together, and really live on top of each other, without hating each other on a massive scale. I am amazed, even today, to walk the streets of Calcutta, still teeming with human bodies, dogs sprawled underfoot panting in the heat, skinny mechanics repreparing brake systems and carburators while you watch, greybeard artisans whittling away at wood carvings, and lovely saree-clad damsels sitting demurely behind grocery counters as men hustle past. I am amazed as I step gingerly around the sleeping figures of young women and children and old men (and oblivious dogs) that no one seems to get stepped on as hordes flow through the sidewalks (if you can call them sidewalks). It is the humanity of the city that makes it joyful, and God's image in every one of us that made Mother Teresa smile. It's an ironic smile, at times, but every time we do mange to smile, it is an act of faith in God Himself, "who makes His sun to shine on the just and the unjust alike." Mother's sisters still smile today, although no one's perfect.

To get to Calcutta from San Francisco you need to spend 15 hours in a plane to Singapore, and then another 4 hours on another plane. Last Monday I left my parish after morning Mass and arrived in Singapore the end of the next day, with no time to offer daily Mass except that one hour between flights. I was able to find a "prayer room" in Terminal 3 and made my way through a curtain to an inner chamber. There only burka-clad women met my confused gaze, and they hastily ushered me out. In the more public room were only men, some washing their feet at little running taps, and others facing Mecca. It was an "interdenominational" prayer room, but the only people interested in praying there, it seemed, were Muslims. So I sat behind the Mecca-facing men, along the back wall, and set up my Mass on a plastic stool for an altar. Just about that time the men all lined up shoulder to shoulder and one of them began wailing out praises to Allah. It was hard for me to concentrate on the Consecration, but somehow I made it through the Mass, on my knees, behind the wailers. No doubt they found it very odd that a white-haired American in white vestments was kneeling behind them lifting bread and wine to heaven, but no one bothered me.

At the end of the 20-minute Mass I packed up to go. A white-haired man older than myself had retired to the back wall himself, and as I stood up he smiled at me. We must give God thanks for small favors, but I think this smile was rather a great favor from God, of whom we are all brothers. If we brothers can keep from killing each other until the Day of the Lord comes, it will be a great favor.

Mother Teresa died 27 years ago today, but as Fr. Thomas and I walked up to Motherhouse in Calcutta this morning for her feast day, we noticed that the hand-painted sign by the front door read "Mother Teresa is ... IN." That's the thing about saints--they never die. They are forevermore "in" after they go to heaven, and much "in" than before. St. Therese of Lisieux (after whom Mother Teresa was named) promised that she would spend her heaven doing good on earth, and that is just what she's been doing (as I can personally testify several times over). 
 
So we entered Motherhouse this morning for the 6am Mass. The chapel was as full as it had been 27 years before when I had first offered morning Mass at Motherhouse. Mother Teresa was no longer sitting up against the back wall, but the same angelic joy from 130 young sisters filled the chapel. She had written a letter to the Archbishop of Calcutta in October 1947 asking to establish the new religious order. He was afraid it would fail, but she wrote that "if the work be all human, it will die with me; if it be all His it will Iive for ages to come."
 
I was delighted to find that the good work Mother Teresa had begun in 1950 has not died with her. I think the only reasonable explanation for its vitality is in her own vitality. Mother Teresa lives with God in heaven! More than when she lived on earth, she is loving Jesus by bringing the souls to His Sacred Heart. Since she was five years old, she explained, she had a burning love for the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and a saint's ardor grows rather than diminishes over time. A saint's love never cools because the infinite love of God fuels it increasingly into eternity.
 
The day before I left San Francisco for Calcutta, our Sunday apostolate to the poor brought a pregnant woman to Mother Teresa's sisters. Sr. Philomena took her in immediately with a big smile! Samantha gave birth the next day, and the baby shows no signs of harm from Samantha's crack addiction. Samantha would have given birth in the street had Mother Teresa not obeyed Jesus' "call within a call" on September 10, 1946. Samantha now has a home, with loving sisters, because the love of God continues to burn through Mother Teresa of Calcutta, 27 years after she left time for eternity.