The Source of Inner Strength

I once gave a day of recollection for Mother Teresa's group in New York, and I talked to the pastor, who was one of the wisest men, when it came to social work, that I ever talked to in my life. He'd been there in that locality twenty-nine years, where seventy or eighty percent of the buildings were vacant and burnt-out. I asked him, 'What is your experience during these last ten or fifteen years?'  'Well,' he said, 'we had a number of priests and sisters who just flooded our area. They were going to reform everything. They had to be involved. They'd been reading Harvey Cox, not Mark or Luke. They ran up against frustrations.  Their theories didn't work out.' Their idealism was defeated. They could not drive out any devils. And because they had no interior strength, they all left. 'If', he said, 'they had had interior strength, if they loved Christ and the cross and the Blessed Sacrament, they could have taken it, as I have taken it and as I love it.' There is no point then in holding workshops to discuss one or the other point of view, because the two must be put together.