OGDEN — Twenty-five Utah men wanted to bring Mother Teresa's message to this city. Now, after they spent two years planning and fund raising, the beloved Albanian nun's face looks out on 24th Street.
A bust of Mother Teresa and a stone monument to unborn babies was dedicated Saturday at St. Joseph's Church, the 101-year-old stone edifice at the corner of 24th and Adams.
In a brief ceremony, the Most Rev. George Niederauer, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, blessed the new memorial and thanked the small group of men behind it: the Ogden Council of the Knights of Columbus.
The memorial will keep us "motivated to seek the city that will come," a city where people at all stages of life are treated with reverence, Bishop Niederauer prayed. The bishop thanked God for "giving us the example of Mother Teresa."
The dedication of the monument was intentionally set near the anniversary of Mother Teresa's death Sept. 5, 1997, said Ed Schulfer, a member of the Knights of Columbus' Ogden council. His fellow knight, Vincent Mancini, added that the men wanted to have the outdoor memorial safely dedicated before winter weather sets in.
"Mother Teresa is known so much for her ministry to the ill and dying in Calcutta — people at the end of their lives," Bishop Niederauer said. "But it's less known that she subscribed to the 'seamless garment' principle . . . which affirms that all moments of life are sacred." In speeches around the world, the founder of Calcutta's Missionaries of Charity spoke out passionately against abortion, urging people to choose adoption.
"What is taking place in America," Mother Teresa said at the National Prayer Breakfast in February 1997, "is a war against the child. And if we accept that the mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?"
The monument at St. Joseph's was built with funds from Project Innocence, a Utah organization that plans to install other memorials to the unborn. Many other such monuments have been placed in cemeteries around Utah, Bishop Niederauer said. But only the Ogden monument pays special tribute to Mother Teresa's efforts to reduce abortion. Michael Dente, the Oregon artist who is teaching this year at Juan Diego High School in Draper, carved the shrine's small sculpture of Mother Teresa. The stone marker was inscribed by Bernie Morris of Morris Monuments in Price.
The Ogden Council of the Knights of Columbus hopes to erect two more memorials to the unborn: next year at St. Henry's Church in Brigham City and in 2002 at St. Rose of Lima in Layton.
The new monument in Ogden will, however, disappear for a few days and then reappear on its spot. It turns out the marker is an inadvertent monument to human fallibility: The word "commitment" was etched into the stone with an extra "t." That will be corrected soon, the Knights promised.
For now, the monument, with the image of Mother Teresa beside it, stands in front of St. Joseph's. "It's open to the public," Schulfer said. "It gives the message to everyone."
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