Word. For the nations capitol to wherever you are you get the opinion that matters the most is your own. This is what democracy looks like. Cspan powered by cable. A gym is with us today courtesy of mark and Daphne Murphy as well as carol and joe young. Jim became a trusted advisor and personal friend of Mother Teresa of calcutta for 12 years. Did the First Reading at her massive canonization in st. Peters square. Headed the White House Office of faithbased and Community Initiatives under george w. Bush and served as president of two catholic colleges. He was u. S. Senate staffer and had floridas 40000 Employee Health and Human Services agencies. In 1996 with Mother Teresas encouragement he founded the nonprofit Advocacy Organization aging with dignity it created the five wishes the advance directive. Which sold 40 million copies and is used in all 50 states. He met his wife mary Mother Teresas washington d. C. Om aids home he continues to provide Pro Bono Legal services for the missionaries of charity. Please give a warm savannahto welcome. [applause] [applause] thank you kathy for the lovely introduction. It is so nice of you to be here today very fair very much at home for a group in jacksonville a little south from here. Southern hospitality is part of my life and i have felt that it sincei got into this area. I want to thank the murphys to for sponsoring this morning. Welcome coach and melinda great friends, hes aging with dignity and his wife terry. Look, i know the reason i am here to speak is because of my longtimefr friendship and workig relationship with the modernday saint george bush. [laughter] just kidding. Just seeing if you were listening. [laughter] this book came about because of the kindness of god that i had the opportunity to meet Mother Teresa. In so im trying to repay the debt. I was invited by Cardinal Dolan to come to a gathering of his media people to do a radio show and television program. He sees me from afar and says how long are you going to milk this thing . And i said i want to make clear mary and i and i are indebted to mother and devoting all the royalties to the missionaries of charity and two other charities aligned with her lifes work. T. Mary is not here with me today because. She didnt like that decision. Im kidding. Just. Yeah, shes great. Youll read her in the book starting on page 84, but i, i wrote this book, the occasion of Mother Teresas 25th anniversary of her death for a number of reasons i certainly wanted to record for my kids and grandkids and family members, friends for the missionaries family members, friends, for the charity themselves in the religious order that Mother Teresa formed. I thought that was important. I knew when i met mother that she was a saint and different from anyone i met. R so any time i spoke with her t was my habit to write contemporaneous notes of what she said and that was very helpful in writing this book. I also wanted to detail the manner of her death. Its beautifulat in chapter 14 its never been published not only the runup to it but the last 48 hours theres such a sweetness, such beauty in how she prepared herself and others for that inevitable moment. It was important to set the record straight on a some oft e critics that have come after her mother in the years after her death that would control her on the internet and post things that arent true, so theres a chapter thats the defense of her and a definitive rebuttal i hope, but the most important reason i wrote the book, to me, was to capture the remarkable woman that was the same. Catholics have a way of taking saints and turning them into little statutes and describing all sorts of qualities to them and say we focus on whether someone levitated in church or the stigmata and so forth, sensational things and in the process that somehow leads us to think they are supernatural, different from the rest of us. Not in spite of her humanness about through it she was a a grt woman, a great mother, tremendous courage. Mother loved life, she loved people. Its sad when you see people that love god and dont love people. Two mother it was the same thing. Thereme were those young women that joined her they were her daughters when i would drive her up to the church or the convent with her sisters would come out to greet her they would all stream out and mother would get out and grab their faces like this and look in their eyes and refocused like they were the ony person in the world of that mattered, very maternal, very much a mother. Sheli liked to laugh and make hr sisters laugh. She liked chocolate. [laughter] laughter so there you have it, the sanctity is eating chocolate. Thats your take away. She wrote poetry, she loved to sing, she and her sisters sang together. She was very well read. Her formal education ended at age 18 but she had a voracious appetite for reading, so there is a collection of all the books she read at the Mother Teresa center. She spoke five languages. She wasnt perfect. It does no good to remember her in a way that describes her as perfect. She wasnt. She had imperfections. She was famously stubborn and was inpatient. Of those imperfections were necessary for a woman who was goingon to need perseverance and conviction and over time, god perfected those imperfections and i watched her, and im going to talk about that a b little bt with what kind of courage that required that she could get angry. She is angry at me one time at an outdoor mass in mexico at the sign of peace moment in the mass. I was going to protect her from these kids coming up so i tell them no, no, and mother said stop, let them come and kind of glared at me. I didnt turn into a pillar of salt. Thats the good news. [laughter] but she would speak about the fact that she corrected someone with anger and would apologize later. For thosee that are catholics ad you know what confession is, she availed herself of that regularly and had things to say. She didnt just say bless me i haventt sinned actually. She understood all along that shee was a work in progress, she was a lone play handmade in a sense. I was asked at the time of her deathht what my thoughts were ba reporter and i said it was francis of assisi that he was the most christlike person since christ and i said i think Mother Teresa was the most merry like person since mary. She was virgin and mother to a world that needed a mother. Her compassion, her love, her tenderness. I think to appreciate mother you have to place her in a Historical Context because she left her home at age 18, said goodbye to her mother at a train station. She never saw her mother again. She went off to the loreto sisters first by train and then by ship and arrived in january of 1929 a couple years of formation, takes her bowels and then teaching at the compound in calcutta for some of the privileged and then some of the poor kids that were at the school. For 15 years history and geography and other subjects and of course india then becomes involved in world war ii in 1939 they declare war on indias behalf without consulting the indians. This led to much unrest. Gandhi was arrested in 1942 because of his opposition. A lot of the sisters left calcutta as the war started to come closer to india, and mother was there on the compound until the british requisitioned it. So they stayed with 300 girls into rented two spaces. One wheree they had to studies and aid and one where they slept and this was how mother was living during world war ii after the british had requisitioned them. As the war endedin in 1945, inda had been promised independence and this began to roil the mocountry particularly in northn india where mother lived because of the hindu muslim conflicts that had been evident throughout indias history but were particularly acute at this time. So during that period, 1945 to 1946, it ended in 1945 those tensions started to spill over to the grade today of killing in 1946. Now picture mother at this point. She nearly died in 1942 from exhaustion. She was teaching so much doing alll this other work at keeping things together for the girls and then no sooner does she recover from that shes made principal 1944 of the school so shes running out of everything. Then the war ends and now the violence begins in the streets and there is the greatest day of killing a 1946, thousands dead in the streets. Mother had to go outside of the compound to get food, dead bodies everywhere. Here is this woman that had come to speak that is in the middle of the postwar battle for independence. 1946 is a seminal year in her life because it was on septembey left not even a month after the great big of killing to go on a retreat, to get a break. So she gets on a train, shes on the train and realizes god is calling her to leave the confines of the convent and go and work with of the poorest of the poor in the streets to satiate the thirst of christ for love and soles. This is what she felt very clearly communicated to her. 1947 comes, and shes back from her retreat. She is now sharing with the priest the intimate details of the visionsis that she had of jesus telling her what to do, to go and come be my light, go into the dark holes and claim these poor souls and love them and give them care. And you can imagine in calcutta now its transformed greatly. Its ones been indias capital a real tool overrun by a series of dreadful developments, the famine 1942, 43 in part to the war requisitioning of both that kept them from being circulated in the country. So she has to deal with the vet and the influx. Millions of dieting and came from the villages scavenging for food and then we had the petitioning of india that led to such violence and of the thedisplacement of 16 Million People in that area. The whole area was on retreat, shes on the train and now your work is about to begin. Kyouve had it easy until now. January 47 she is trying to understand what jesus wants her to do. She didnt know how to do it, how to get there. Shes talking to a priest and the nuns suspected of having an inappropriate relationship with the priest because they had all these private conversations and so they banished her to about 150 miles away to another convent so she goes to the six months of difficulty being less understood and adjudged but she bears it and during that period of time, she recounted in her letters these intimate discussions jesus had with her about what it was that he was asking her to do and thats recounted in the book. All of this is to say how remarkable a woman could then add to that point to decide im going to go out just because god has called me to into the wstreets, the work the bishop s terrified. He said okay, well is this going to take some time and it did. She gets her approval from the nuns in ireland, the mother house and the same month that gandhis assassinated. Mother never met gandhi but i found it very interesting that there was a convergence at two points on the independence in august 15th, 1947 they were both in calcutta and in the same week thatto mother got permission too into the streets to go deal with all costs the untouchables, the same week that she got that permission, gandhi was assassinated. It felt like almost a passing of the torch. Mother teresa then has to get nurse training so she can deal with the lepers and others that she would be administering to and then december 20, 1948 she starts off in the slums. Think of the courage it took for this woman to do this and now shes goingoo to ask some of her oldls school girls that she thought if want to join me and one by one they did. So by 1950 there were 12 of them. Mother had a quote she said im learning to want what he gives and not what i prefer. Kind of a assessment of your inner life. One of the jobs i did for her as her lawyer is keepeo people from raising money. She prohibited fundraising. She said she preferred the insecurity of divine providence. Beautiful dependence for everything. I know youre probably wondering why she had a lawyer. They would say what kind of a world do we live in when even as she had to have a lawyer. [laughter] but she liked to sue people justkidding. Of these women joined now theres 26 women living in this cramped space on the third floor. A 26 women and one bathroom. Her first miracle. [laughter] so they moved in 1949 to the mother house where they are to this day. You look at the development of that and see how is it possible that this woman could have attracted 3800 women to follow her into the worst places in the world by the time of her death she was in 120 countries into some of the worst slums in the world. She had 700 homes. Hundreds of men that had joined and dozens of priests and missionary fathers. How did i end up meeting mother . I told the story in the first few chapters that i will simply say it was the mercy and kindness at that time in my life i was a very disaffected catholic. I wasnt living my faith. I was comfortable in my own hypocrisy and the beauty about being h a hypocrite is you can spot it everywhere. So i was judging everybody that i was watching this woman from afar and thought shes practicing the faith. Shes living the gospel. I am not but she is. The senator that i worked for of oregon already knew her so heth was sending me overseas on a trip and i thought why dont i go by india on the way back. I didnt want to be around poor people. Very hard to do. I had no interest so i thought heres what im going to do im going to go into calcutta then on the way home to hawaii for five days and thats how i talked myself into doing it and thats what i did. She was bristling with energy and was everything i wasnt, purposeful, intentional, this was a woman in love with god. So dramatic to see her the tenderness of that relationship even though chapter 11 talks about the darkness that she experienced but she had the core conviction of love for. The poor and she said have you been to my home, go there and ask for sister luke. I had the rest of the day to kill, why not do so i said sure then i go to the home and i walk in at my embassy in a shirt and pressed slacks stepping over people laying by the entrance and just states that id never seen in my life. I walked in. It was clean, beautiful. I asked for sister luke and she said hi i was with mother theresa this morning. Its great to drop her name. She said she told me to come here. Great, heres some cotton solution. Go and clean that guy that has scabies in 46. Im like okay bed to 46. I am here for the tour. Its the last thing i wanted and why i feel comfortable talking with you today and my friends on cspan because it was the mercy of god there wasnt one tiny bit of me that wanted to go back but i realized as the years went by that when i touched that man, jesus in his disguise touched me back. One thing was how she aged. Mother saw aging is a blessing, not a curse. She saw it as a momentum in her life she was drawing closer to god, going home to god. When mary was pregnant with our third child, we were living in tallahassee. Mother was coming to washington so we wanted to have her bless the baby so we leave the two little ones behind and fly to washington for the day. Motherer comes out, mary, youre pregnant, when are you do . And she said august 8th but i think i will be early. Mother says no you will have that a baby on my birthday. I said i hope not because your birthday is august 26 and if shes 18 days late, my life will be living heck. [laughter] so long story short, the ninth of august 205th, she goes into labor and we are like my gosh the angels are at work. Midnight districts 120 in the morning and out comes the baby and the doctor says congratulations you have a little boy. My wife says are you sure. He said yes, heres how we tell. [laughter] while mary was in the hospital, mothers very close friend got a call from sister priscilla suggesting that we try to get back there because mother was dying and was in the hospital. So with marys blessing i went to calcutta and when we arrived at the airport, she said you need to go straight to the hospital because mother is on oxygen. We get to the hospital, go to the area where the room is and there is activity. I see the sisters and think no, she didnt just die did she. No, mother was laying there and pointing up just looking up and they were all likein what is she looking out and she said im going home. Tim going home to god. Mother hand of that orientation she came from god and was going to god and she believed that god was with her. She said the greatest thing was to love and be loved. The passage from johns gospel love one another as i have loved you. Mother believed that. It was as simple to her as matthews gospel whatever you did to the least of my brother and you did it to me. I remember when she met with janet reno she took her by the hand and opened up janets hand and she was a tall woman, the u. S. Attorney general. Mother took her hand and said you did it to me she called it the five finger gospel but she thought it wasnt just bread that would feed a starving man it was also the bread of friendship forin people that are feelinged unloved. You know, she was asked what the worst disease was, was that leprosy and she said loneliness, rich and poor but often feel unloved and unwanted, unneeded. Mother spent her life in service and a said a life that is and lived for others is not worth living and i think she spent all of her energies loving god and of the poor and living life. She was truly human and it was a privilege to see the beauty of that humanity and how she allowed herself to be loved at the end as she aged. I met her the week she turned 75 and some will say by age 75 your best years are behind you. It wasnt a true for mother at all. They are evangelical and there is a power to them because people watched her. They watched what she said but they watched as she aged. She was five heart attacks, malaria dozens of times, broken arms, ribs, legs, you name it. She was in a plane crash and survived. Mother teresa had an interesting life. Its recounted here, but shes all that aging was a blessing. She knew she was getting closer to god. She s knew if she was asked to suffer she would accept it and in all these things she showed the beauty of her humanity and i hope that this book gives some reflection to that and honors that remarkable woman who dominated the 20th century. I would be happy to answer any questions that you have now. [applause] dont be shy. Come up to the microphone. You can ask about my hairdresser if you have a question about that. [laughter] the question is where was she born. She was born in northern macedonia. She, an interesting childhood. Very prosperous family. Her dad was a merchant, very successful. Also involved in the Movement Towards albanian independence and at age eight her father was poisoned. So she then was cast, her fathers Business Partner appropriated the assets of the family so she was cast into poverty and her mother had to work. She had two siblings and when she felt the call to god to be a missionary and to go to india it was a sacrifice for her mother for her to leave her and i write about that relationship with her mother in the book, but its mother tried to see her in this early 1960s, and albania was under an atheist communist dictatorship that had the country locked down and they were not going to let her out sd that was a cross. Mother always said when she died she would be judged by her mother tod see whether she honored the sacrifice her mother had made by letting her go be a missionary. So very interesting childhood. And very interesting life because she stayed in calcutta after she started Mission Charity she didnt leave for 30 years after she had arrived and so her first speech in the united states, anybody know where it was . Was it lasas vegas . She spoke at the convention it was her first public speech 1916 so if you want to make a religious pilgrimage in honor just tell your wife to call him. [laughter] kathy mentioned when theyu introduced the five wishes. I worked for a hospice care in boulder, colorado for almost ten years and when it first came out i would like for you to touch on the development of that. Happy to. Five wishes is an advanced directive. I tell how after that moment i thenth became more and more involved with the sisters and ultimately one of the most important things i was doing is running interference while shees was opening homes in the 1980s aids was spreading like wildfire and the people died precipitously. The poor had nowhere to go so mother opened homes. Again i was shamed into it. I didnt wantt to do that but i was seeing these women do it. I was like if they are doing it i can do it. So i ended up living in the homeland from those experiences i wrote five wishes which is an advanced directive that helps you plan for and discuss endoflife care not just medical needs, it is a legal document but the personal, spiritual and emotional needs how you want to be remembered sf you can have a peaceful vision for your end game so theres now 40 million copies out and its in 30 languages so you can do five wishes. Org, not doing a commercial for it but i love it and its helped a lot of families avoid family feuds and understand the wishes if you want to be a go to daughter, son. For your mom and dad when they need you than most, know what their wishes are especially medical wishes because sometimes medicine doesnt know when to stop. We should be managing pain better and i watched how mother did it with the help of awi coue of other people to and i created for the purpose of helping educate people about how they could have a beautiful death deathlikemother has that is des. Great presentation. A speech that was given at the Prayer Breakfast in washington where she spoke of a culture of life versus a culture of death but resonated with me. I was there. February, 1994. It was the first time she met clintons. She met them backstage. T they talked afterwards but mother gave a speech i think cspan carries to this day. She spoke unabashedly about her prolife views and unflinchingly with president clinton sitting there and i described that breakfast in the book. I met them afterwards. I described that in here. Mother had access to leaders after the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 leaders to her simply meant i can bring my sisters to come serve the poor like she met with castro and was able to get into cuba. Castro said we dont have any poor in cuba. Thats what he told her. They said well you have old people, can i come and care for them. So very clever. I wrote about that in the book that she could call from a payphone and get into the oval office. So she was involved in politics but she tried not to be in it. She was there for jesus, she was theree for the poor and recognized she had great judgment about recognized her focuso was to touch jesus in te disguise of the poor. Yes sir. Mother teresa spent an awful lot of time communicating with people. Shes also communicated with my brother, john. My question is how many people did she actually correspond with in that way. During the process where the catholics look at making someone a saint, they collect all of the material in the persons life so i had to turn in all my handwritten letters and i was one of w the 113 witnesses that the vatican put under oath to testify because i dealt with Worldly Affairs with mother. Many could talk about the sanctity and prayer fullness, so i could talk about how she dealt with government leaders and some corrupt people. They collected at this. Thats where they came up with her letters her own personalth letters because the priests that had them that were the confessors that was part of the collection process. My guess is she used to stay up late at night during her own correspondence, this is a woman that got up every day of her life at 4 40. All of her sisters all over the world to this day do that. They wash their clothes by hand, no computers, simple how these 25 years. My guess is of regular correspondence she had her sisters writing her and im guessing she had hundreds of regular correspondence. Sometimes i had a threepage letter from her so she used to sign 17 acts of love each letter. I made a fortune. [laughter] im not your publicist but i would like you to recommend people buy your book for two reasons. I talked to you before so i understand you dont want to get into the politics of Mother Teresa but i would like you to recommend people buy your book so they can read pages 110 and 111 and also so they can read about all the opportunists some people took to the end in demonizing her. Those are very interesting stories. Mother teresa has always been one of my all time heroes so it is such an honor to be able to hear you talk about your experiences with her so thank you so much for coming. I have a question about your life. You said when your child was born may you were prepared to name her teresa and it was a boy so my question is what did you name your son . [laughter] in honor of a priest that died in world war ii at this place for a family man, they were going to execute people that escaped from a concentration camp and the randomly picked a bunch b of people and one of thm as a father that was begging i have a wife, i have children, so the priest stepped forward and they said i will take his place. Whats interesting about it is when i got to the hospital room and showed her the photo she said i was at his candid decision. Naming our kids was always a challenge. We also wanted to name one after john paul the great, john paul too. But theas problem was that would have made him john paul touhy. [laughter] we thought that is a bridge too far. He will be invites all the time at catholic school. So we just went with john. [laughter] any other questions . I think we are supposed to break soon. Can i talk about the cheerfulness of Mother Teresa . Sure. One of the characteristics that joined is the total surrender, loving trusting cheerfulness. Trust in cheerfulness. Mother was very serious about cheerfulness. I was with her one time in San Francisco when she was giving a talk to these young women about to take their vows these were girls probably in their 20s and theyd been three years of formation now they are about to take their vows. Mother was standing there i remember she was going out. If you cant be cheerful with of the poor i want you to go home right now, just like that, go home. I remember she then started imitating a grumpy none and walked back and forth and they were all laughing but they all got her point. Because theres nothingum worse than a grumpy christian. Its a contradiction. [applause] have i ever asked myself why me . Ier do. I feel like i won the lottery. Its the mercy of god. I say i wish you had read me my rights when i met you because it did change. I didnt see that in my plan when i was in jacksonville. Enbut its been 37 years i spent every day trying to pay back the debt and thanking god for that because its a privilege of a llifetime to meet a woman like that and the implications in your life. She sent 35 sisters to our wedding but i metin my wife at n aidsds home, not your standard y to meet someone. So yes. We all have our stories of how god touches us and invites us to love one another and hopefully this book will encourage and inspire lives and service to reach out to people that are lonely and people who are poor in spirit or materially and to spread the love and the joy of thetr gospel. We are talking about shooting down balloons while there are these issues facing the country. And theres only one way i know of that can bring people together and that is love of god and neighbor. God bless you and thank you for coming out today. [applause] for the 22nd year in a row booktv is live with of the library of Congress National book festival