Mother Teresa--Skeptic?

[Doug]

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."

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and - except for a five-week break in 1959 - never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God.She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor.


"Life Sucks!"

"The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God - tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Says the Rev. James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and the author of My Life with the Saints, a book that dealt with far briefer reports in 2003 of Teresa's doubts: "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented." Recalls Kolodiejchuk, Come Be My Light's editor: "I read one letter to the Sisters [of Teresa's Missionaries of Charity], and their mouths just dropped open. It will give a whole new dimension to the way people understand her."

Read the rest here.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

An extreme example of Catholic teaching - assume god is there, if you can't feel him there's a reason for it even if you don't know what the reason is and keep going through the motions.

Most gods are kind enough to make humans forget actual contact with them. (See the chapter of Wind in the Willows were Ratty and Mole find Portly, the lost otter child.) There is very little kindliness in the christian god.

[Doug]

DOUG
Did anyone see the ABC News report on Mother Teresa? It featured Dan Barker, of the Freedom From Religion Foundation!

Go here.

[fej]

mother theresa is recognized primarily for the courage and compassion she showed in emersing herself completely in her work among the untouchables in india. her apparent selflessness and humanity are why she is revered even outside the church. her actions far outstrip her beliefs or lack thereof.
so perhaps we should not celebrate too much her battles with self-doubt. it is not unusual for those that experience such doubts to cling to the familiarity and comfort of the rituals of their faith, while questioning it's underpinning.
as one who has never believed in god, self-doubt is a nearly constant companion. i applaud and sympathize with anyone that recognizes the limitations of his/her own perception, whatever the specific nature of the struggle.

[Doug]

mother theresa is recognized primarily for the courage and compassion she showed in emersing herself completely in her work among the untouchables in india. her apparent selflessness and humanity are why she is revered even outside the church. her actions far outstrip her beliefs or lack thereof.

DOUG
Her work was primarily setting up places where people could die with dignity. She could have spent her millions setting up hospitals so that many whom she helped die wouldn't die at all, but she liked the suffering. She thought that the physical agony made people closer to Jesus. Her hospices were staffed with people unqualified to diagnose diseases, so in many cases they could not distinguish terminal cases from nonterminal ones. No doubt many people were helped to die who could have been saved.

I think she liked inflicting pain on others because of her own pain inside.

She also was a horrible influence on the Indians in that, in a nation of 1 billion + people, she denounced artificial birth control. Shame on her. As Peter Jennings stated when she died, on the ABC broadcast, she was not nearly as loved in India as she was elsewhere, where people didn't really know what she did.

In fact, there were many in India who hated Mother Teresa and who thought that she was doing a great deal of harm.

Mother Teresa also endorsed dictators such as Duvalier and others.

You may wish to check out this link:
See here. It inlcudes:

...she had rallied to the side of the Duvalier family in Haiti, for instance, that she had taken money - over a million dollars - from Charles Keating, the Lincoln Savings and Loans swindler, even though it had been shown to her that the money was stolen; that she has been an ally of the most reactionary forces in India and in many other countries; that she has campaigned recently to prevent Ireland from ceasing to be the only country in Europe with a constitutional ban on divorce, that her interventions are always timed to assist the most conservative and obscurantist forces.

And this:

Critics regreted Mother Teresa's relationship with the right-wing dictator of Haiti Jean-Claude Duvalier, as when she received the Haitian Légion d'Honneur in 1981, and with Communist dictator of Albania Enver Hoxha, as when she visited his grave in 1987.
They complain that she has accepted donations from Charles Keating, who stole in excess of US$252 million in the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s, and from the British publisher Robert Maxwell, who embezzled UK£450 million from his employees' pension funds. Critics alleged she interceded on Maxwell's behalf, wrote a letter to the court urging leniency and refused to give back donation when privately asked by the district attorney.

You write:

so perhaps we should not celebrate too much her battles with self-doubt. it is not unusual for those that experience such doubts to cling to the familiarity and comfort of the rituals of their faith, while questioning it's underpinning. as one who has never believed in god, self-doubt is a nearly constant companion. i applaud and sympathize with anyone that recognizes the limitations of his/her own perception, whatever the specific nature of the struggle.

We should use Mother Teresa in our battle against fundamentalists in the same way they use converts to their side, although they often resort to lies and distortions. I don't see anything wrong with telling the truth about one of their most celebrated examples of piety.