Christ in the Poor

One of the chapters of Mother Teresa: In My Own Words is titled "Christ in the Poor" in which Mother Teresa directly expresses a theme that is present in nearly all the other chapters. Teresa takes the Christian Scriptures to teach that when she performs acts of service for the needy and the poor, she literally performs these acts for Jesus Christ. When Jesus says, "What you do for the least of these, you do for me." Teresa takes him to mean something close to literal, in that Christ is somehow present in a particularly potent fashion within the lives of the suffering and poor.

For example, Teresa discusses a sister in the Missionaries of Charity who came back from caring for a leper for three hours; she claims that she felt as if she was touching and caring for the body of Jesus Christ...