Vatican City - 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
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.
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'."
The Vatican has insisted that Mother Teresa’s path to sainthood will not be affected by a deep crisis of faith that she appears to have undergone for the last four decades of her life.
“Mother Teresa has already been beatified,” said Monsignor Robert Sarno, who is in charge of her case at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. “For her canonisation as a saint, she now requires one more verified miracle.”
Mgr Sarno said it was “not surprising” that Mother Teresa had, at times, turned away from God.
“It would be surprising if she hadn’t,” he said. “It’s really very simple. People have to realise that the Church does not canonise God. She was a human being, not a cartoon super hero like Batman or Superman, and she faced reality. Even the saints are faced with the difficulties of life.”
He drew attention to the struggles undergone by the apostles in the New Testament.
“They had their problems. They abandoned the Lord and then they rose above that and continued in their faith,” he said.
The Vatican has over 35,000 pages of documents attesting to the virtues and shortcomings of Mother Teresa.
Mgr Sarno had to close the investigation because of the enormous amount of evidence that poured from Mother Teresa’s supporters.
Over 100 witnesses, far more than in any other case for sainthood, have testified in the process.
According to some of the letters within her file, Mother Teresa began to struggle with her belief in God at roughly the same time as she started caring for the poor and sick in Calcutta in 1949.
The Catholic Association of Bengal, the largest lay organisation in Calcutta, has mounted a constant prayer for the last two weeks to push her cause forward at Rome.
The organisation has nominated 2007 as "the year of Mother Teresa's Sainthood", since Sept 5 will mark the 10th anniversary of her death.
Euguen Gonsalves, the president of the association said it was "clear that she lived a saint's life and there are no doubts for many in the world that she is already a saint".