Clinton Withdraws Mother Teresa Campaign Ad

Senator Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has officially withdrawn a controversial photo featuring Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta with the then-First Lady from a campaign ad. The pro-life nun's order, the Missionaries of Charity, directed them to cease and desist using the copyrighted image for political purposes.

Sister Nirmala, the Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity, requested the Hillary for President campaign to stop using the image that appeared scandalously to link the abortion activist candidate with the order's humble founder, who was renowned for her advocacy on behalf of the poor and helpless, especially the unborn.

Since 2003, the name and all images of Mother Teresa have been protected by copyright by the Missionaries of Charity. On her deathbed Blessed Mother Teresa had asked her order to guard her name from opportunists who would attempt to use her to advance their own ends.

The campaign video was been pulled after the Catholic-based political advocacy group Fidelis alerted the order on May 14, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews.com.

The new video now omits the nun's image, and the old video can no longer be accessed on YouTube.

The ad had shown a photo of Hillary waving beside Blessed Mother Teresa as the narrator, Clinton's husband, former US President Bill Clinton, said "Hillary in effect, was the face of America, in Africa, in India…"

Immediately after the picture there followed a clip of Hillary declaiming before the International Conference on Women in Beijing, "It is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights." Blessed Mother Teresa, however, vehemently opposed equating abortion with either women's rights or human rights and sent a letter to the same conference stating that "Motherhood is the gift of God to women" and that it is destroyed "by the evil of abortion."

"Blessed Mother Teresa is revered in America and across the globe as one of the greatest champions of the dignity of the human person," said Fidelis President Joseph Cella. "It is wholly inappropriate, disrespectful and disturbing that Hillary Clinton shamelessly exploited Mother's image as a political tool."