>>> Mother Teresa doubted God's existence
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Agence France-Presse
>>> Last updated 08:56am (Mla time) 08/26/2007
>>>
>>>
>>> NEW YORK -- Mother Teresa, who is one step short of being made a
>>> Catholic saint, suffered crises of faith for most of her life and
>>> even doubted God's existence, according to a set of newly published
>>> letters.
>>> "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," the missionary wrote to one confidant, Reverend Michael
>>> Van Der Peet, in 1979.
>>> The letters, some of which she wanted destroyed, appear in "Mother
>>> Teresa: Come Be My Light," due to be published next week, 10 years
>>> after her death. Extracts of the book appear in the latest edition
>>> of Time magazine.
>>> In more than 40 letters spanning some 66 years, the ethnic Albanian
>>> nun who devoted her life to working with the poor in the slums of
>>> Kolkata in India, writes of the "darkness," "loneliness" and
>>> "torture" she is undergoing.
>>> "Where is my Faith -- even deep down right in there is nothing, but
>>> emptiness and darkness -- My God -- how painful is this unknown pain
>>> -- I have no Faith," she wrote in an undated letter addressed to
>>> Jesus.
>>> "If there be God -- please forgive me -- When I try to raise my
>>> thoughts to Heaven -- there is such convicting emptiness."
>>>
>>> "I call, I cling, I want -- and there is no One to answer -- no One
>>> on Whom I can cling -- no, No One. -- Alone."
>>>
>>> In her early life, Mother Teresa, also known as "The Saint of the
>>> Gutters," had visions. In one, she talked to a crucified Jesus on
>>> the cross.
>>> But the letters reveal that apart from a brief respite in 1959, she
>>> spent most of the last 50 years of her life doubting God's presence
>>> -- much at odds with her public face.
>>>
>>> "The smile," she wrote in one letter, is "a mask."
>>>
>>> In another letter, written in 1959, she wrote: "If there be no God
>>> -- there can be no soul -- if there is no Soul then Jesus -- You
>>> also are not true."
>>> The book's compiler and editor Reverend Brian Kolodiejchuk is a
>>> member of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity and was
>>> responsible for petitioning for her sainthood. She was beatified --
>>> one step short of sainthood -- in 2003.
>>> "I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense
>>> spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented,"
>>> Kolodiejchuk told Time magazine.
>>> "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," he added.
>>>
>>> Cardinal Angelo Scola, the patriarch of Venice, said Saturday that
>>> the letters showed Teresa was "one of us, that she did all her work
>>> as we do, no more no less."
>>>
>>> Even in the depths of doubt, Mother Teresa "always had recourse to
>>> the most elementary form of the exercise of one's will, that of
>>> asking Jesus each day to reveal his face," said Scola, who had
>>> already written about the letters in the Vatican publication
>>> Osservatore Romano, quoted by the ANSA news agency.
>>> Mother Teresa was beatified just six years after her death, when
>>> late pope John Paul II set on her a fast track to sainthood. It was
>>> something the nun seemed to have predicted as early as 1962, when
>>> she wrote in one letter:
>>> "If I ever become a Saint -- I will surely be one of 'darkness.' I
>>> will continually be absent from Heaven."