At the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, the personal secretary to Pope John Paul II gave this unprecedented first-person account May 13 of the day the Holy Father was shot.

I once listened to a conversation between Mother Teresa and my mother at a meeting in the Bronx. They were like two neighbors chatting over a backyard fence.

There is nothing more riveting than the sight and sound of powerful truths being spoken quietly. Mother Teresa broke almost all the rules of good speech writing during her National Prayer Breakfast address in 1994, but delivered an enormously powerful and deeply memorable speech.

When a true genius is born, nothing in the family or its circumstances allows us to predict the new arrival.