Mother Teresa Was a Poser

There's a controversial (to some) new piece in the latest issue of Time magazine that alleges the Saint of the Gutters continued her good works despite a loss of faith and belief in God. According to letters published only this month, Mother Teresa suffered from an "intense spiritual darkness" she compared to hell.


The artcle opens with the following:


Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.
— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979

A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

This may come as a shocking revelation to many who have long viewed Mother Teresa as the very emobdiement of a holy life imbued with the goodness of God. But I think what her struggle proves is that you can do good works without the assistance -- or the insistence -- of God. People can be charitable; people can be giving; people can be kind, of their own accord, for their own purposes, and often times such purposes are simply the goodness and peace of mind you get from giving someone else a helping hand. Charity and giving are their own reward.




Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, is currently being fast-tracked to sainthood. Wouldn't it be ironic is she were to become the Church's first atheist saint?