Friday, August 24, 2007 | Reason : In the News | print version

Mother Teresa's '40-year faith crisis'

by Malcolm Moore, Telegraph

Thanks to David J. Fleming for the link.

Reposted from:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/24/wteresa124.xml

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who may be canonised as a saint by the Vatican later this year, had a deep crisis of faith in God for the last 40 years of her life, according to a new set of her letters.

Mother Teresa's crisis of faith won't prevent her canonisation, says Vatican
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=T5ATF2NJTRSSDQFIQMFCFFOAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2007/08/24/wteresa224.xml

teresa

The correspondence, which spans most of Mother Teresa's life, shows that she felt alone and in a state of spiritual pain from around 1949, roughly the time when she started taking care of the poor and dying in Calcutta.

Mother Teresa, who is likely to be canonised, admitted that she had begun to doubt God
Although she publicly proclaimed that her heart belonged "entirely to the Heart of Jesus", she wrote to the Rev Michael Van Der Peet, a spiritual confidant, in September 1979 that "Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak."

The letter was written just a few weeks before she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her charitable work.

More than 40 other letters, many of which she had asked to be destroyed in her will, show her fighting off feelings of "darkness" and "torture".

The letters are published for the first time in a new book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, and are edited by the Rev Brian Kolodiejchuk, a close friend.

He wrote that during that period, Mother Teresa did not feel God "in her heart or in the eucharist".

Mr Kolodiejchuk gathered the letters as part of the process to make Mother Teresa a saint, and is responsible for arguing in her favour. He said the letters would show people another side of her life, and said that the fact that she was able to continue her work during such torment was a sign of her spiritual heroism. Mother Teresa has been beatified, and is awaiting canonisation.

The Vatican has insisted that the revelations will not obstruct her path to sainthood.

"Lord, my God, you have thrown [me] away as unwanted - unloved," she wrote in one missive. "I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer, no, no one. Alone. Where is my faith? even deep down right in there is nothing. I have no faith. I dare not utter the words and thoughts that crowd in my heart."

She added: "I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of the darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?"

She even compared her problems to hell and admitted that she had begun to doubt the existence of heaven and God.

"The smile," she wrote, "is a mask or a cloak that covers everything. I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God, a tender personal love. If you were there you would have said, 'What hypocrisy'."

RELATED: "Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith" by TIME Magazine
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html

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1. Comment #65486 by sane1 on August 24, 2007 at 1:00 pm

The Time magazine link is more complete - This story is this week's Time mag cover story, I think. The crazy lady actually didn't believe god existed. Priceless. Hitchens will love this one. His quote in the Time mag piece is tame compared to what I expect to hear from him in the near future.

Other Comments by sane1

2. Comment #65493 by Eelis on August 24, 2007 at 1:16 pm

Haha, fantastic! Made my day :-).

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3. Comment #65498 by jimbob on August 24, 2007 at 1:26 pm

"More than 40 other letters, many of which she had asked to be destroyed in her will, show her fighting off feelings of "darkness" and "torture"."

Hmm, I guess somebody didn't show much respect for her will!

As for any threats to sanctification, since when did the Vatican show any inclination to let facts alter myths?

Other Comments by jimbob

4. Comment #65499 by oxytocin on August 24, 2007 at 1:32 pm

I actually find that very sad. I imagine that she was so trapped in her persona as "Mother Theresa" that she might have felt unable to change this important aspect of her worldview. It takes a lot of courage to admit when you're wrong, especially about something like this [and when it's so public]. I suspect that there are probably many people like this in the world. This might be one hypothesis for why she was so surly.

...and does anyone else see a problem with publishing something that she explicitly wanted destroyed? This seems profoundly unethical to me.

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5. Comment #65504 by sane1 on August 24, 2007 at 1:51 pm

oxytocin: If she hadn't been such a hypocrite, and had actually helped people with modern ideas instead of celebrating their sufferin with stone age dogma and theological torture, maybe I'd feel sad.....or maybe not. There are way worse things in the world than being showed as a hypocrite after you are dead.

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6. Comment #65507 by Yorker on August 24, 2007 at 1:55 pm

4. Comment #65499 by oxytocin

...and does anyone else see a problem with publishing something that she explicitly wanted destroyed? This seems profoundly unethical to me.

Since when has the media been bothered about ethics?

Other Comments by Yorker

7. Comment #65510 by MartinSGill on August 24, 2007 at 2:15 pm

I feel sorry that she was trapped.. but the really sick bit for me is that her "close friend" not only doesn't destroy her letters as she asked, he goes and makes them available to the entire world.

The reason? He's a priest and he's pushing her sainthood as a coup for the catholic church. After all the catholic church hasn't been covered in roses recently and it needs a new hero to distract the disillusioned masses from all the child molesting priests.

Catholic Church Uber Alles, and the wishes of their victim be damned.

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8. Comment #65513 by BAEOZ on August 24, 2007 at 2:30 pm

What to think? This woman didn't give a crap about helping people to not suffer, she just helped them suffer. She thought the worst crime in the world was abortion. The fact that she didn't believe in god seems to show that she projected her own nihilism onto the poor unfortunates. Or maybe she's a saint and I have a misunderstanding of what that word means.....

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9. Comment #65516 by pissinintothewind on August 24, 2007 at 2:44 pm

Sad in some ways...Poor mad old bugger, if she had`nt have gone for the regular re indoctrination and allowed the light of reason to take over, she might have done some real good. Look on the bright side though, this is a fine example of Hitchens challenge to the theist in finding some good work a religious type would do that an atheist would not!

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10. Comment #65518 by MAS2007 on August 24, 2007 at 2:48 pm

Yet one more example of why all magical thinking must be abandoned. One bright spot she can no longer directly impact other lives. How could you expect anything else from a religious confidant?

roxyartwork

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11. Comment #65519 by sceptic on August 24, 2007 at 2:49 pm

The good Sister is criticised by Germaine Greer for her politics, but has impeccable atheistic credentials. She should be OUR patron saint.

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12. Comment #65524 by ergaster on August 24, 2007 at 3:04 pm

I think this is remarkable news. It's almost as if the pope himself had expressed doubt. It will be interesting to read Hitchens next installment in Slate, he cannot let this pass. Teresa was obviously even more evil than Hitch imagined.

She didn't even have faith in a god to back up her belief that she must keep her flock in perpetual discomfort and destitution. So what is her excuse? There is none. She enjoyed the limelight and the Nobel prices but her effort in the slums of Calcutta was fraudulently on the behest of a god. And that's what makes "the old bitch" a fake and a bona fide charlatan.

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13. Comment #65526 by ? on August 24, 2007 at 3:21 pm

This lady had some very sick ideas, but I can't completely dismiss her crisis of faith as mere "hypocrisy."

There is a long tradition with ascetics and other extremely religious types of a "dark night of the soul." Even the stories of Jesus have him stuggling with dispair and alienation from God (even though he also IS God....well, whatever! I'm not the one claiming this stuff makes sense).

There is a fine but real line between the kind of doubt which leads to freethought and the kind which still implies a strong core of devotion and desire for belief beneath the questioning. We are complex creatures with many conflicting impulses and layers of self.

The kind of doubt she seemed to be going through is experienced as a kind of mourning of the percieved absence of God and hoping he's there. I actually trust religites more if they admit to this---only in her case, she didn't actually admit it.

I'm impressed on one level, despite my loathing of her creepy worship of suffering and reactionary political agenda. The "woman of simple faith" had a something of Tillich or Bergman beneath the surface!

Seems like she missed her calling as some sort of existential theologian, which would have been much better than what she was.

Other Comments by ?

14. Comment #65528 by nancy2001 on August 24, 2007 at 3:24 pm

The hypocrisy of Mother Teresa reminds me of J. Edgar Hoover, the cross dressing head of the FBI who blackmailed homosexuals in midcentury America.

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15. Comment #65530 by Ivan The Not So Bad on August 24, 2007 at 3:37 pm

Does this mean that religious apologists can now start to wheel out Mother Teresa alongside Hitler and Stalin as another example of an evil atheist killer?

:-)

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16. Comment #65534 by Michael P. on August 24, 2007 at 4:07 pm

Don't saints have to believe in God? Isn't it in the job description?

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17. Comment #65542 by weavehole on August 24, 2007 at 4:56 pm

Spot the difference.

"I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak." - Mother Teresa

"I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of the darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul." - Sylvia Plath

Weird story.

Other Comments by weavehole

18. Comment #65544 by Dr Benway on August 24, 2007 at 5:27 pm

This doubt thing means nothing. C'mon, you ex-believers know the drill:

"My sheep, some of you have heard the arguments of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. You've read one of their books, and now feel worried and doubtful. Be assured, even the greatest of the saints struggled to hold fast to their faith. Even Jesus cried out to the Father, "My God why hast Thou forsaken Me?" The Lord said our faith would be tested. The testing is necessary to purify the spirit of earthly concerns, so we may one day draw closer to God."

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19. Comment #65545 by Russell Blackford on August 24, 2007 at 5:34 pm

I'm not entirely surprised. I'm sure many prominent religionists feel similar doubts, but are unable to take an extra liberating step into the light of disbelief. What does bother me is what a few others said above ... if she requested that the letters to be destroyed, why weren't they?

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20. Comment #65559 by Dower on August 24, 2007 at 8:14 pm

Mother Teresa's experience reminds me of my own.

I was a fundamentalist Christian and a lay preacher for years. I was a Bible scholar, but I was blind to all the contradictions of the Bible.

However, when I prayed or lead the congregation in prayer, I was very conscious of the fact that there was no one "out there."

Dower

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21. Comment #65563 by prettygoodformonkeys on August 24, 2007 at 8:36 pm

weavehole, good observation: both are examples of horrible suffering. I submit that we accept Sylvia Plath's because we can relate to it, but it is really no different in the little nun.

It's even possible that they each fucked up the same number of people - that is to say, confused, struggling mammals.

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22. Comment #65565 by oxytocin on August 24, 2007 at 8:47 pm

Russell, totally agree. The executor of her will has some explaining to do. Apparently she chose...poorly.

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23. Comment #65571 by Shuggy on August 24, 2007 at 10:08 pm

Very odd. She really believed in belief. I guess she prayed "Lord, I believe, help me in my unbelief!" a lot. A pity she didn't talk to anyone but believers about it.

Another way of looking at it is that she couldn't break the habit of (addiction to?) belief, though the part of her intellect that had previously interpreted good feelings resulting from belief as feedback from God, stopped doing so.

What's really annoying about her is that for 48 years she continued to behave as if not only the catholic God existed, bad enough, but that all the other teachings of the church were true as well. She never once seemed to have let herself think, "Well, if there is no God, what follows from that? What is the basis of my morality? Not even "What can I salvage of my faith?"

This is annoying (from TIME):

Not all atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and Martin assume that Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there. ... But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book's Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned.

HelLO-o! We're over here. You don't need to use the speculative future tense, you can ask us. Actually, if (since) God doesn't exist, it's not as if he walked out. The man in the song might come back.

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24. Comment #65577 by Ian on August 25, 2007 at 12:52 am

Like others here, I'm not happy they didn't respect her wishes, but there is something even more troubling: her reasons for doing what she did.

Is it possible she did what she did because she wanted to talk to God? It would explain why she was so indifferent to people's real needs, merely providing an austere place for them to die.

Was it really nothing but vanity?

Other Comments by Ian

25. Comment #65579 by Tobbe on August 25, 2007 at 12:54 am

You can not legally demand that somebody destroys a letter you have sent them. A will is not a suitable document for the purpose either.

If you have letters or other writings, diaries etc, that you don't want to be public you should destroy them before you die.

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26. Comment #65585 by dvespertilio on August 25, 2007 at 1:44 am

It's exactly what I've been saying here for the past several weeks. God is a vast empty spaciousness, cold and dark in places, but light and open in others. Because God is the cosmos. Apart from matter and energy ( and now we know about dark matter and dark energy) what else is there? So of course, all mystics and saints worth there salt eventually come to the realization that their icons of god are just passing illusions, neither more nor less divine than anything or anyone else. What Mother Theresa failed to do, apparently, is to develop beyond the prescribed institutionalism of the rc church and go where the spirit of the cosmos would have taken her. Had she done that, I trust she would have melted away from religious life and gone on to lead a quiet, productive, compassionate life somewhere in the world, quite unknown and unremarkable. What the world needs is caring compassionate people who help from the spaciousness of their hearts, not dusty, moldy old sexually repressed virgin imagos from another place and time. Sad that she never reached that. All the saints I know are anonymous.

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27. Comment #65597 by Dr Benway on August 25, 2007 at 3:39 am

I read the article, which I found rather sad. Hallucinatory wish fulfillment can give you a brief love buzz, but it doesn't sustain and nourish the heart. If those many confidants had shared this fact with her, she might have escaped her austere, masochistic emotional prison.

On a lighter note, from near the end of the Time article:

And who would have thought that the one thought to be the most ardent of believers could be a saint to the skeptics?

Heheh. How timely.

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28. Comment #65603 by BillySands on August 25, 2007 at 4:30 am

It is sad that religios bullshit ruined her enjoyment of life.
However, she shows that you can do good without god

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29. Comment #65628 by chrisrkline on August 25, 2007 at 7:42 am

#28

I don't think she proved she can be good without a god, since it is debatable that she was good.

It does show though, that doubt is not always an immunity against doing harm in the name of dogma. I have always wondered if for some people, it is doubt that leads them to commit atrocities in a frantic effort assuage that same doubt.

Doubt may be the first step to a reasonable life, but many go kicking and screaming.

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30. Comment #65633 by godisanidiot on August 25, 2007 at 8:06 am

Now it's all clear:

Humanist -> The good she did.
Desperately trying to intertwine religion with her works -> The bad she did.

Classic example of the well known Weinberg statement.

;)

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31. Comment #65635 by Bonzai on August 25, 2007 at 8:07 am

This is a truly sad and pathetic story.

No matter how you see it, her charity works were apparently motivated by doubt rather than faith or any kind of conviction,--religious or otherwise. They represented a fervent attempt to create that moment of ecstasy which simulated God's presence. But in the end she failed and it left her with even greater doubt and emptiness even though she kept up the appearance. She was an addict desperate in getting her "God" fix.

I don't want to be harsh on her because there is a very human quality to her story. These letters reveal a tormented soul (no pun intended), they provide a rare glimpse of the Quixotic battle she waged to reconcile the impossible. These letters are strangely moving in their thoughtfulness and brutal honesty. I think these letter should be published even though she wanted them destroyed. Kafka too instructed that all his work be destroyed, but no one seem to mind that his executor chose to publish them instead. These letters are of interest not because of morbid voyeurism. On the contrary, they reveal MT as a human being with all her vulnerabilities, she came across as a much more sympathetic figure in these letters than the bloodless icon we see in public. The Vatican's plan to turn her into a saint is an ultimate insult because it will stripe away all her human qualities.

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32. Comment #65639 by TimH on August 25, 2007 at 8:56 am

That's the saddest thing I ever read...if only she'd followed her intuition. I can only imagine what she could have accomplished by publically denouncing the Vatican's birth control policies. It's an opportunity missed, through lack of courage on her part.

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33. Comment #65645 by BillySands on August 25, 2007 at 10:00 am

I don't think she proved she can be good without a god, since it is debatable that she was good.

I was refering to the physical act of caring for the unwanted, but you are of course right, the catholic church is responsible for much suffering and the spread of HIV

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34. Comment #65647 by walk on August 25, 2007 at 10:08 am

Here's the link to Hitch's Slate article from 2003 on the beautification of MT in 1998. It gives an excellent overview.

http://www.slate.com/id/2090083/

Can't wait for an update from Citizen Hitch! You KNOW it's coming!
(Is that sweat I see coming out from under the papal tiara?)

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35. Comment #65648 by pissinintothewind on August 25, 2007 at 10:20 am

To be frank I don`t give a rats arse about her wishes for the letters, in fact it shows the hypocrisy and the deceit she was willing to indulge in to propogate her belief. At one stage she is praying about bringing souls to him (jesus) like some bloody vampire. It seems her main endevour was converting people, bringing succour to the helpless and dying by converting them to the way of christ... Imagine those poor bastards lying in their own piss shit and pain being proselytised to by some insane old woman... Speaking of hypocrisy I get slight wiff of it from some of the previous postings on this site.

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36. Comment #65649 by Bonzai on August 25, 2007 at 10:35 am

To be frank I don`t give a rats arse about her wishes for the letters, in fact it shows the hypocrisy and the deceit she was willing to indulge in to propogate her belief.

I don't think it was willful deceit and hypocrisy. She appeared genuinely trying to convince herself that God existed and he is love and all that but she couldn't overcome her instinct, on the other hand she was too addicted to break with the religion. So she was stuck in a limbo of cognitive dissonance. People in such a state suffer constant internal turmoils and they do strange things in spite of themselves. She was stuck in this state for 40 years.

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37. Comment #65652 by pissinintothewind on August 25, 2007 at 10:55 am

Just being economical with the truth?

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38. Comment #65656 by Linda on August 25, 2007 at 11:25 am

It is difficult to respect or praise this person someone who claimed to be motivated to help the poor yet did not hand out condoms and was miserly with aid. Were did the cash go?

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39. Comment #65661 by pissinintothewind on August 25, 2007 at 11:42 am

Some went into creating similar institutions and into training nuns the rest is in the vatican bank.

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40. Comment #65662 by dhweaver on August 25, 2007 at 11:42 am

This article is very powerful. I'm sure there are many Christians (Catholics) who look up to people like Mother Teresa when they're dealing with doubt about the existence of God. The crutch of "if my faith is good enough for Mother Teresa then it's good enough for me" has been broken for them. I hope more revealing ammunition against faith comes to light from iconic people of religion like her.

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41. Comment #65664 by 10 on August 25, 2007 at 12:09 pm

Seems like preparation to deny sainthood.
Though I could be seeing design where there is none

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42. Comment #65668 by RickM on August 25, 2007 at 12:38 pm

Interesting. There's not enough information here about Agnes, but do I detect a case of Major Depression?

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43. Comment #65674 by pissinintothewind on August 25, 2007 at 1:30 pm

Don`t know wether you do or not maybe you should try for the Randi million dollar challenge.

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44. Comment #65675 by pissinintothewind on August 25, 2007 at 1:33 pm

Oh I forgot..:-)....Tom

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45. Comment #65694 by ? on August 25, 2007 at 5:32 pm

Comment 65664 by "10"

----"Seems like preparation to deny sainthood."

In any event, I hope the new Pope tones down the canonization mania instituted by John Paul II, who recognized a truly bizzare number of saints for an individual Pope. A couple of hundred years could usually go by without that many new saints. The world must be getting better and better! :)

Why do I care? Its because the "saint" idea, (at least when transplanted into the modern world and applied to figures within living memory) is blatant, crude supernaturalism--not just theology or metaphysics. Its saying that there is real evidence of miracles in the modern world and torturing the evidence to "prove" it. Even (hypothetically) assuming the supernatural is real, one would expect modern methods of inquiry to reveal less of it rather than more just by filtering out sophisticated fraud and phenomena now explainable through science that seemed supernatural at one time.

Look at the section in *god is Not Great* about the Mother Teresa issue. Hitchens researched the miracle claims by Teresa's followers in detail and they were as silly as claims of Pentacostal faith healing and New Age "medicine." When a Pope supports this kind of stuff over and over again it is very dangerous because of the size of his audience. Even the big shot faith healers and homeopaths cannot make a statment and have about a billion people listen.

(On the positive side, John Paul II had as reasonable views on evolution as a theist can.)

Other Comments by ?

46. Comment #65710 by 601 on August 25, 2007 at 11:58 pm

Discussions of doubt never seem to explain what happens next:

My doubt grew into the best aspect of my faith, and I was enlightened into a comfortable Atheist (or at least agnostic).

I joyfully embrace alternating delusion and disillusion?

I force doubt from my mind by sheer willful ignorance!

The third group causes the most trouble, since they can feel better if they convince others of their wisdom.

Other Comments by 601

47. Comment #65728 by aquilacane on August 26, 2007 at 6:28 am

This is a prime example that one does not need the belief in god to do good (sometimes good) things. Despite her feelings that there was no god, or that god did not acknowledge her, she still took care of the poor. She behaved morally, without any imagined connection with a supreme being. Were she to have actually denounced god, she very well may have continued her work. I disagree with much of her approach, but in general, she did a hell of a lot more for people than I ever have. It's a shame she couldn't have shared her honesty with more people, when she was alive.

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48. Comment #65734 by fin on August 26, 2007 at 7:45 am

This is a prime example that one does not need the belief in god to do good (sometimes good) things. Despite her feelings that there was no god, or that god did not acknowledge her, she still took care of the poor.

Did she actually take care of the poor? Or did she just give them a place to suffer and die? And to praise the lord for the food and shelter.

Wasn't she a great supporter of suffering because that is what would bring you closer to god.

"Follow the money." What happened to all that money she was given?

Other Comments by fin

49. Comment #65749 by willbonds on August 26, 2007 at 9:26 am

Clearly the popes don't think of themselves as "fact checkers" but rather "deciders."

Other Comments by willbonds

50. Comment #65752 by AtheistAttorney on August 26, 2007 at 10:08 am

There is no other word for a scandal like this but "Delicious".

Mother Theresa, the champion of the masses, a Catholic's Catholic, was an UNBELIEVER!

Lol oh its almost too good to be true.

Next they will be disowning her, pointing to Chris' book and saying she did those terrible things because she was an atheist!

[EDIT]
I have heard this "long dark night of the soul" bullshit but 40 years of it - FFS, how low will the apologists go to defend the crumbling edifice of Catholic Hypocrisy.

On CNN they had some simpering Catholic journalist who made the following incredible statement
"Well you know even our lord jesus felt
that god had abandoned him on the
cross."
I thought so god thought he had abandoned himself?? jesus christ if you people are so fucking stupid that you can stomach the inherent glaring contradiction in that belief you deserve to see out your last days in the torture chamber created by the bitch you are trying to defend. Have a nice life.

That shit makes me madder by the day.

Other Comments by AtheistAttorney