he never wrote her thoughts down, or published a book. She believed that to write things down would have detracted from the power of her work, and from the intimacy of the Sisters of Charity's life with the poor. She left her worldly connections behind at just fourteen years old, believing that a mission beyond the bounds of family and neighborhood was the right place for her.

But the words she spoke in life, reported back to us by contemporaries in service, such as Jose Luis Gonzalez-Baludo, reveal a revolutionary vision of social justice that would set the word around her upside down. "I have come.to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience," she explained.

She founded the Sisters of Charity mission on a simple precept: if you could bring hope, love, and comfort to the worst off and most despairing in their dying hours, then you could bring love and comfort to anyone, anywhere in the world.

And so it was. At the beginning, the sisters moved women and men ravaged by the elements, near death, into hospitals. They stood vigil in those hospital lobbies to verify, and sometimes force, their admission. They comforted the abandoned and forgotten in their last hours, to make sure that they knew at the end someone was there who loved them....

 

TRUE GIFTS