Mother Teresa is hardly the first person to practice the idea of bringing people to the One, True, Faith by encouraging them to look at their own faith. We Catholics are mighty shrewd.
Fulton Sheen also suggests taking the truth found in the horrible,awful Koran (and yes there is some believe it or not) and use it to bring people to the Faith. He points out that missionaries have already softened the hearts to hear the words their are saying through their charitable acts.
This is from Fulton Sheen’s “Mary and the Moslems”. It’s worth a whole read but these parts are pertinent:
It is our belief that this will happen not through the direct teachings of Christianity, but through a summoning of the Moslems to a veneration of the Mother of God.
The Koran, which is the Bible of the Moslems, has many passages concerning the Blessed Virgin. First of all, the Koran believes in her Immaculate Conception, and also, in her Virgin Birth. The third chapter of the Koran places the history of Mary’s family in a genealogy, which goes back through Abraham, Noah, and Adam. When one compares the Koran’s description of the birth of Mary with the apocryphal Gospel of the birth of Mary, one is tempted to believe that Mohammed very much depended upon the latter. Both books describe the old age and the definite sterility of the mother of Mary. When, however, she conceives, the mother of Mary is made to say in the Koran; “O Lord, I vow and consecrate to you what is already within me. Accept it from me.”
When Mary is born, the mother says: “And I consecrate her with all of her posterity under thy protection, O Lord, against Satan!”
The Koran passes over Joseph in the life of Mary, but the Moslem tradition know his name and has some familiarity with him. In this tradition, Joseph is made to speak to Mary, who is a virgin. As he inquired how she conceived Jesus without a father, Mary answered: “Do you not know that God, when He created the wheat had no need of seed, and that God by His power made the trees grow without the help of rain? All that God had to do was to say, ‘So be it, and it was done.’”
The Koran has also verses on the Annunciation, Visitation, and Nativity. Angels are pictured as accompanying the Blessed Mother and saying: “Oh, Mary, God has chosen you and purified you, and elected you above all the women of the earth.” In the nineteenth chapter of the Koran there are 41 verses on Jesus and Mary. There is such a strong defense of the virginity of Mary here that the Koran, in the fourth book, attributed the condemnation of the Jews to their monstrous calumny against the Virgin Mary
Many of our great missionaries in Africa have already broken down the bitter hatred and prejudices of the Moslems against the Christians through their acts of charity, their schools and hospitals. It now remains to use another approach, namely, that of taking the 41st chapter of the Koran and showing them that it was taken out of the Gospel of Luke, that Mary could not be, even in their own eyes, the most blessed of all the women of Heaven if she had not also borne One who was the Savior of the world.
I’m pretty sure that Mother Teresa has read Fulton Sheen. This might even be where she got her ideas.
So, basically, Mother Teresa was not one called to the “Convert now!” tactic. Some are and some aren’t. Now, I don’t know if the Church will canonize her (she has not been canonized yet - only beatified) but I’m pretty confident that they won’t condemn her. If they did, a whole lot of saints would have to be condemned too. I mean, Dark Night of the Soul, using the truth in their religion to bring them to Christ, extreme acts of charity, etc. She’s in pretty good company.
