Teresa, Bright and Dark

The publication of Mother Teresa's letters, concerning her personal crisis of faith, can be seen either as an act of considerable honesty or of extraordinary cynicism (or perhaps both of the above). These scrawled, desperate documents came to light as part of the investigation into her suitability for sainthood; an investigation conducted by Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who is the editor of this volume. And they were actually first published in the fall of 2002, by the Zenit news agency—a Vatican-based outlet associated with a militant Catholic right-wing group known as the Legion of Christ. So, which is the more striking: that the faithful should bravely confront the fact that one of their heroines all but lost her own faith, or that the Church should have gone on deploying, as an icon of favorable publicity, a confused old lady who it knew had for all practical purposes ceased to believe?

Crises of faith, or "dark nights of the soul" as they were termed by St. John of the Cross, are not a new idea to Roman Catholics. St. Therese of Lisieux, the 19th-century French Carmelite who was the namesake of Mother Teresa, seems to have died while enduring an experience of spiritual night that she likened to a dark tunnel. Making the best of it, many confessors and theologians have even argued that such tests are actually a kind of confirmation or vindication. The Rev. Joseph Neuner, one of those to whom Mother Teresa turned in her own agony, enjoined her to believe that her ordeal gave her a share in the Passion of Christ, and that His absence was in a way a "sure sign" of his "hidden presence" in her life. This slightly convenient diagnosis seems to have cheered her up, if only temporarily. (Here might be the place to declare my interest, and to state that at the invitation of the Vatican, I testified against the beatification and canonization of Mother Teresa, as well as to confess that I tend to believe that the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence.)

Moreover, this was no mere temporary visitation of doubt. Here are some of the things that she told her various advisers. "For me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves but does not speak." "Such deep longing for God—and … re—ulsed—empty-no—faith-n— love-no—zeal.-[The saving of] Souls holds no attr—ction-Heaven means nothing."  "What do I labor for? If there be —o God-there can be n— soul-if there is no Soul then—Jesus-You also are not true." Like an old-fashioned Morse signal, the cryptic and dot-dash punctuation somehow serves to emphasize and amplify the distress.

It is no small thing for a Catholic to feel no "presence" whatever, "neither in her heart nor in the eucharist," as Father Kolodiejchuk has phrased it. The sacrament of the mass is not to be undergone in a wrong frame of mind, and there are hints here and there that Mother Teresa was afraid she was endangering her soul. She felt that she should not even be thinking such things: "So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncove— them-because of the bla—phemy-If there —e God-please forg—ve me-When I try to raise my thoughts to —eaven-there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very—soul.-I am told God lo—es me-and yet the reality of 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?" That last question in particular must have been an annihilating difficult one to face.

Now, it might seem glib of me to say that this is all rather unsurprising, and that it is the inevitable result of a dogma that asks people to believe impossible things and then makes them feel abject and guilty when their innate reason rebels. The case of Mother Teresa, who could not force herself into accepting the facile cure-all of "faith," is that of a fairly simple woman struggling to be honest with herself, whil— also-this is imp—rtant-striving to be an example to others. And I believe I have a possible explanation for the crisis. It derives from something that Lord Macaulay said, when reviewing Leopold von Ranke's "History of the Popes." The Roman Catholic Church, he wrote, "thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts" [my italics]. Wise bishops have long known to beware of the fanatical and the overzealous. After being lectured on doctrinal matters by the ultraconservative convert Evelyn Waugh, the pope is said to have concluded the audience by murmuring, "Yes, Mr. Waugh. I am a Catholic, too." When Mother Teresa first rebelled against the quiet life of the Loreto Sisters in 1946, and sought permission from her superiors to start a new—order-The Missionaries of C—arity-she was at first turned down and told to stay in her allotted place of humility. The local archbishop, a man named Ferdinand Perier, then found he had a true believer on his hands: a woman hungry for humility and yet fantastically immodest. ("Come Be My Light," the slightly sickly subtitle of this book, is what Mother Teresa claims, not that she said to Jesus, but that He said to her.) Only after she had wearied the diocese with demands that her ambition be referred to the Vatican did she finally, after two years of pleading and cajoling, get her way. And then, two months after she started her own show in Calcutta in 1948, the demons checked in and, in effect, never quite checked out again. She got what she wanted, and found it a crushing disappointment.

It seems, therefore, that all the things that made Mother Teresa —amous-the endless hard toil, the bitter austerity, the ostentatious religious or—hodox-were only part of an effort to still the misery within. Again, the timeline would seem to support this interpretation. After 10 years of gnawing doubt, she reported a brief remission on the death of Pope Pius XII in the fall of 1958. Praying for him at a requiem mass, she found herself relieved of "the long darkness … that strange suffering." The respite only lasted for five weeks and then she was back "in the tunnel" once more. Soon after came the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which at a gathering of India's Catholics in Bombay she violently opposed, saying that what was wanted was not new thinking but more work and more faith. What could be a clearer indication of a deep need to suppress all doubt, both in herself and others?