Was Mother Teresa an atheist?

reposted from Guardian

Letters from one of the Catholic church's best known figures reveal the crisis of faith that afflicted her.

Andrew Brown August 24, 2007 2:30 PM | Printable version

I will always be grateful to Mother Teresa because, the only time I met her, she said something so monumentally silly as to release me from all reverence for saints. She clasped my hand and looked up at me with her bright blue eyes, in which the sincerity was cranked up to 11, and said: "Please tell your readers ... that contraception murders love."

Now we have learned that the world-changing sincerity felt fake from the inside, too: even as she was receiving the Nobel prize, she asked her confessor to pray for her because she could feel nothing when she prayed herself and no longer had any experience of God. In a letter, written to Jesus at her confessor's request, she sounds like an adolescent Dawkins:

I call, I cling, I want ... and there is no One to answer ... no One on Whom I can cling ... no, No One. Alone ... Where is my Faith ... even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness ... My God ... how painful is this unknown pain ... I have no Faith ... I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart ... & make me suffer untold agony.

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them ... because of the blasphemy ... If there be God ... please forgive me ... When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me ... and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.

Nor was this written before she found her vocation among the poor. In the period before she started her work in Calcutta, she was intimate with Jesus, and did not mind telling her confessors and superiors all the details. Jesus, she believed, had told her - she had heard his voice - to go and work among the poor. The dialogue seems to have come from a bodice-ripper: Jesus tells the nun, in her 30s: "You are, I know, the most incapable person, weak and sinful, but just because you are that, I want to use You for My glory. Wilt thou refuse?" She responds as the heroine should: "I want to love Jesus as he has never been loved before."

Her confessor, watching these efforts, observed that "[Her] union with Our Lord has been continual and so deep and violent that rapture does not seem very far". She was at last able to announce to him that "Jesus gave himself to me."

And after that, almost all through the next 50 years, He never wrote; He never called. Her friends all talked to Him, or said they did. But He was never there for her. She just kept working, getting more and more famous and powerful - and rich, if she had wanted it - while He ignored her every plea. The only time her sense of despair and abandonment lifted was for five weeks after Pope Pius XII died. She had prayed for a sign that God was pleased with her work.

Told just by itself, the story would be interesting enough: a peasant woman of extraordinary tenacity and drive moves halfway around the world, using religion to lift her out of obscurity and give her a fulfilling and important life, even though the faith and its consolations are taken away from her when she gets the autonomy she really wanted.

What makes it really extraordinary, though, is that the letters have not been revealed by one of her avowed enemies, like Christopher Hitchens, but by the man who is responsible for promoting her canonisation, the Rev Brian Kolodiejchuk, who has prepared an edition of her letters as part of the evidence that she really was a saint. "It will give a whole new dimension to the way that people understand her," he told Time magazine.

But, of course, it hasn't shaken his faith at all. Perhaps a man in his position would have to see her loss of faith, or at least its replacement by willpower, as evidence of her true closeness to God. Even so, only the most hardened atheists will not be shocked by the ease with which the Catholic church has assimilated the news that its most famous saint thought of herself as a hypocrite when she talked about the love of God. But if you are a sufficiently hardened atheist, the story takes yet another twist. After all, suppose religion is a purely manmade lie: could Agnes Bojaxhiu possibly have struck a better bargain with anything manmade than she did with the Catholic church?