>>>> 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."