Weekends on cspan2 are an intellectual feast. Every saturday American History to the documents americas stories, a on sundays booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding for cspan2 comes from these Television Companies and more, including wow. The world has changed. Today the fast reliable Internet Connection something no one can live without so, is can servr customers with speed, reliability, value andhoice we are now are now more than ever it all starts with great internet. Wow, along with these Television Companies, supports cspan2 as a public service. Jim is with us today courtesy of mark and Daphne Murphy as well as carol. And joe young. Jim two he became a trusted advisor and personal friend of Mother Teresa of calcutta for 12 years and did the First Reading at her last of canonization in st. Peters square. He founded the nonprofit Advocacy Organization with dignity and the five wishes advanced directive which sold 40 million copies and is used in all 50 states. Two, he met his wife mary in Mother Teresas washington d. C. s aide home and continues to provide Pro Bono Services for the missionary of charity. Please give a warm savannah welcome to jim towey. [applause] thank you, kathy for the lovely introduction and so nice of you to be here today. I feel very much at home. I group up in jacksonville, a little south from here, and the Southern Hospitality is part of my life and ive felt it since i got into this area. I want to thank the murphys, too, for sponsoring this morning and welcome, coach and Melinda Durham in georgia and jim bolis and his wife terry. Look, i know the reason im here to speak is because of my longtime friendship and working relationship with a modern day saint, george bush. Just kidding. [laughter] to see if youre listening. Now, this book came about because of the kindness of god that i had the opportunity to meet Mother Teresa and so im trying to repay the debt. I was invited by Cardinal Dolan of new york city to come to a gathering of his media people to do his radio show and his television program. He sees me from afar and he goes, towey, how long are you going to milk this Mother Teresa thing . And i so i want to make clear that mary and i, we are indebted to mother and we are devoting all the royalties to the mission of charity and other charities aligned with her life work. So were not keeping a penny of that. [applause] marys not here with me today because she didnt like that decision no, im kidding. [laughter] shes great. Youll read about her in the book starting on page 84. But i wrote this book on the occasion of Mother Teresas 25th anniversary of her death for a number of reasons. I certainly wanted a record for my kids and my grandkids and family members, friends, for the missionaries of charity themselves, the nuns, religious order that Mother Teresa formed. I thought that was important. I knew when i met mother that she was a saint. She just was different from anyone id ever met so anytime i spoke with her, it was my regular habit to then 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 really beautiful, its in chapter 14. Its never been published. Not only the runup to it, but the actual last 48 hours, theres such sweetness to it, such beauty and how she prepared herself and others for that inevitable moment. It was important for me also to set the record straight on some of the critics that have come after mother in the years after her death, those that troll her on the internet, and post things that arent true, so theres a chapter 11 thats a defense of her and a definitive rebuttal, i hope. But really, the most important reason i wrote the book, to me, was to capture the woman, the remarkable woman that was the saint. Catholics have a way of taking saints and turning them into little plastic statues and ascribing all sorts of ethereal qualities to them so we focus on whether someone levitated in church or, you know, had the stigmat and so forth, thinking theyre supernatural and different from the rest of us. Mother teresa became a saint not in spite of her humanness, but through it. She was a great woman, a great mother, tremendous courage. Mother loved life. She loved people. Its a its sad when you see people that love god and dont love people. You know, to mother, it was the same thing. She was enthralled by her sisters, those young women that joined her. They were her daughters. When i would drive her up to the church or to the convent where the sisters would come out to greet her, theyd all stream out and mother would get out and grab their face like this and look in their eyes and just focus on them like they were the only person in the world that mattered. Very maternal, very much a mother. She liked to laugh. She liked to make her sisters laugh. She liked chocolate, you know . So there you have it. The surest path to sanctity is eating chocolate. Thats your take away. You know, she wrote poetry. She loved to sing. She and her sisters sang together. She was very wellread. Her formal education ended at age 18, but she had a voracious appetite for reading and so, theres a collection of all the books she read that filled shelves back in tijuana 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 in a manner that says she was perfect. She wasnt. She had imperfections. She was famously stubborn. She was impatient. And those imperfections were necessary for a woman who was going to need perseverance and conviction, and over time god perfected those imperfections and i watched her and im going to talk about that a little bit, what kind of courage that required that she could get angry. She got angry at me. One time at an outdoor mass in mexico at the sign of peace moment in the mass, all of these kids started rushing toward her and i was to her left and i was going to protect her from these kids coming up so i jump up the kids and tell them, no, no, no, and mother says, stop, let them come and she just kind of glared at me, you know. I didnt turn into a pillar of salt. Thats the good news. [laughter] but, she would speak about the fact that shed corrected someone with anger and she would go and apologize later. For those of you who are catholics and you know what confession is, she availed herself of that sacrament regularly and she had things to say in it. She didnt just go in and say me bless, well, i havent sinned actually. [laughter] no, she understood all along that she was a work in progress, that she was a lowly hand maid in a sense. I was asked at the time of her death what my thoughts were by a reporter and i said, well, it was sort of francis of assisi that he was the most christlike person since christ and i said i think that Mother Teresa was the most mary like person since mary, that see was really virgin and mother to a world that needed a mother. Her compassion, her love, her tenderness. I think to really 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 loretto sisters first by train and then by ship and arrives in january, 1929, a couple of years of formation, takes her vows and then is teaching at loretto compound in calcutta, a walled area for some of the privileged kids of calcutta and then some of the poor bengaly kids that were at the school and she was, for 15 years, history and geography, other subjects and of course, india then becomes involved in world war ii in 1939, the viceroy declares war on indias behalf without consulting the indians. And gandhi and others opposed this. Gandhi was arrested in 1942 because of his opposition. Well, 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 mother and one other sister stayed with 300 girls and they rented two spaces, one where they had studies and ate and one where they slept and this is how mother was living during world war ii after the british had requisitioned. Then, of course, as the war ends in 1945, india had been promised independence and this began to roil the country, particularly in northern india where mother lived because of the hindumuslim conflicts that had been evident throughout indias history, but were particularly acute at this time. So for during that period, 1945 to 1946, the war ended, of course, in august of 45, those tensions started to spill over to what was called the great day of killing in august of 1946. Now, picture mother at this point. She had nearly died in 1942 from exhaustion. She was teaching so much, doing all of this other work, keeping things together for the girls. And then, no sooner does she recover from that, then shes made principal 1944 of the school, so shes running everything. Then the war ends and now the violence begins in the streets and then theres the great day of killing in 1946, thousands dead in the streets. Mother had to go outside the compound to try to go get food, dead bodies everywhere. Here is this woman who had come to teach in india in the middle of a post war battle for independence. 1946 is the seminal year in her life because it was on september 10th when she finally left, not even a month after the great day of kills, to go on retreat to get a break. So she gets on a train, shes on the train and realizes that god is calling her to leave the confines of the convent and go and work with the poorest of the poor in the streets, to satiate. And 1947 comes and shes back from her retreat and shes now sharing with the priest the intimate details of visions 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, all the people. And you can imagine in calcutta now its transformed greatly. Had it once been india capital, a real jewel, but overrun by a series of dreadful developments, the famine, 194243, owing in part to the war. Requisitioning of boats that kept the rice from being circulated in the country. So she leaves she has to deal with that and the influx. Millions died, many came from the villages, scavenging for food. Then you have the partitioning of i india, which led to so much violence and the displacement of 16 Million People in that area. So now youve got the whole area roiled this violence and goes into retreat and on the train and jesus is saying no, now your work is about to begin, youve had it easy up until now. She comes back january of 47 trying to understand what jesus wanted her to do. She knew what she was supposed to do, but didnt know how to get there. How does this single, solitary woman do this. Shes talking to the priest and the nuns suspect her of having an inappropriate relationship with the priest because theyre having private conversations so they banish her 150 miles away to another convent and she goes through six months of difficulty mcjudged and misunderstood and bears it. During that period of time she recounts in her letter intimate discussions that jesus had with her about what he wanted her to do and thats recounted in the book. All of this is to stay a woman can at that point decide im going to go out because god has called mae to, into the streets. The bishop is terrified he says, okay, well, is this going to take some time . And it did. And mother peststered him with a bunch of letters and led to finally his approval. She gets her approval from the nuns in ireland, the mother house in the same month that gandhi is assassinated. I found that mother never met gandhi, but i found it very interesting, there was a convergence at two points on the day of indias independence august 15th, 1947, mother and gandhi were both in calcutta. The same week that mother got permission to go to the streets to deal with all castes of india, the untouchables, and the same week she got permission gandhi was assassinated. Felt like almost a passing of the torch. Mother teresa then has to get nurse training so she could deal with the lepers that she would now be administering to and in 1948 with a muslim girl accompanying her she starts off in the slums. Think of the courage it took for this woman to do this and now shes going to ask some of other old school girls that she taught, do you want to join me . One by one, they did. By 1950 there were 12 of them in a oneroom space in calcutta where mother had a quote there, she said im learning to want what he gives and not what i prefer. Kind of an assessment, i think, of her inner life. You know, one of the jobs i did for her as her lawyer was keep people from raising money in her name. She prohibited fund raising. She said she preferred the insecurity of divine providence. You know, a beautiful dependence on god for everything. I know youre probably wondering why she had a lawyer. President bush when he would introduce me, towey was her lawyer and what kind of a world that she had to have a lawyer. She liked to sue people kidding, kidding. [laughter] i helped her with immigration and other things in the book and theres a chapter on interesting cases by the way of what i ran into. These women joined now, theres 26 women living in this cramped space on the third floor. 26 women and one bathroom, yeah, her first miracle. [laughter] so, they move in 1949 to the mother house where they are to this day. So you look at the development of that and you look through her life and you see how is it possible, how is it possible that this woman could have had attracted 3800 women to follow her into the worst places in the world. By the time of her death she was in 120 countries and in some of the worst slums in the world. She had 700 homes, you know, she had an order, hundreds of men that had joined as brothers and dozens of priests and her missionary and charities fathers. How did i end up meeting mother . I tell the story in the first few chapters, but ill simply say it was gods mercy and kindness. At that time in my life, i was a very disaffected catholic. I wasnt living my faith. Pascal described sin as licking the earth and i was licking the earth and i had tasted sin and i was comfortable in my hypocrisy. The beauty about being a hypocrite, you can spot it everywhere. I was judging everybody, but i was watching this woman from afar, now shes practicing the faith, living the gospel, but im not and i wanted to meet her. The senator from oregon, Mark Hatfield knew her and he was sending me overseas on a trip and i thought why dont i go back through india. The problem was, i didnt want to be around poor people. Very hard to do and i had no interest. Im going to calcutta one day and on the way home to hawaii for five days. And thats how i talked myself into doing it. And thats what i did. And i met mother, a little tiny woman. She came out. It was the week she turned 75. And just bristling with energy. She was everything i wasnt. Purposeful, intentional, in love with god. This was a woman in love with god. So dramatic to see her tenderness of that relationship. Even though chapter 11 talks about the darkness that she experienced im sorry, chapter 12. She went through a period of darkness, she never lost her faith. She had the core conviction of gods love for the poor and she saw jesus in his distressing sides of the poor and i was introduced to her at the home of dying, and mother, a brief meeting. Have you been to the home of the dying . I said no, go and ask for sister luke. I had the rest of the day to kill, and say hi to my sisters for washington and i go home to the home of the dying an and i had my embassy driver there, and pressed shirt and dress slacks and stepping over people in states id never seen in my life in poverty and misery. I walked in, it was clean and there was peace and it was beautiful. I asked for sister luke and she said hi. I said i was with Mother Teresa this morning, thought it was great to drop her name. I was with Mother Teresa. And i said and she told me to come here she said great. Here is some cotton and here is solution and go and clean that guy that has scabies in bed 46. Im like, oh, bed 46. Im here for the tour. You know . [laughter] it was the last they think i wanted. So, and thats why i feel comfortable talking to you today and my friend on cspan because it was the mercy of god. There wasnt one tiny bit of me that wanted to go back to that man, but i realized, as the years went by, that when i touched that man that jesus in his distressing disguise touched me back. I want to stress a couple of things about mothers life that i think are important. One was how she aged. Mother saw aging as a blessing not a curse. She saw it as a momentum in her life where she was drawing closer to god that she was going home to god. When mary was pregnant with our third child, we were living in tallahassee and mothers coming to washington so we wanted to have her bless the baby, so we leave the two little ones behind and me fly up to washington for the day and mother comes out, mary, youre pregnant. When are you due . And mary says im due august 8th, but i think ill be early and mother says, no, youll have that baby on my birthday. And i said mother, i hope not because your birthday is august 26th if shes 18 days later my life will be a living heck. [laughter] so, long story short, the night of august 25th, mary goes into labor, were like oh, my gosh, the angels at work were going to have a little girl and were going to name her teresa. Midnight strikes and the doctor says, congratulations, you have a little boy. And my wife says, are you sure . Yeah, this is how we tell. This is how they train us. [laughter] and so, but while mary was still in the hospital we got sandy mcmuhr tri, mothers very close friend got a call from sister priscilla and suggested that we try to get back there because mother was dying and she was in the hospital. With marys blessing, i went to calcutta with sandy. When we arrived at airport, you need to go straight to the hospital, shes on oxygen, please, can we get there before she dies. We get up to the hospital the area where her room is, theres a buzz of activity and i see the sisters and i thought please, no, she didnt just die, did she . And the sisters said no, no, mother was laying there and pointing up a