The first thing I thought of when I saw the Time article was Hitchens pouring himself a drink in celebration. I'm not qualified to defend Mother Teresa (except for having read Saint John of the Cross), but neither is he, I think, to lambast her the way he so happily has. I loved the man when I was 16, but he's losing me, mostly because I feel like at this point he outsources the responsibility of believing in something (i.e. other people) to Orwell. He's still brilliant and entertaining as hell and all--but, anyway, if you look at Teresa's works rather than her reasons, her behavior rather than her motives, as William James suggests you do in The Varieties of Religious Experience, you still end up with a saint. He was an atheistic pscyhologist; for Christians of all sects, I don't see how swallowing this pill is anything but the right sort of remedy for the pseduo-religious Donohue-esque bullshit. 

Mother Teresa's words are not a sign of atheism. It is very common in the spiritual journey of the saints to question their faith. People go through dry spells or desert experiences. These ultimately increase their thirst for God. I believe they are in fact tools God uses to draw us closer to him.

 Having been a Protestant minister and now a lay Catholic, I can tell you this experience is not uncommon among believers.

Moreover, the OT. is full of stories of Patriarchs who lost their faith, fell from grace, and in the end we redeemed.

Look at David. He not only committed Adultery but murdered Uriah the Hittite to cover it up. In the end the scriptures tell us he was a man after God's own heart.

 I find very little difference between his 51st Psalm and the words of prayer uttered by Mother Teresa.

As far as these letters indicate, she lost her faith before becoming a Catholic celebrity and never regained it. The Church will of course sanctify clerics and laymen who had moments of doubt and shame, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones on Jesus, but the point of sanctification is that those clerics and laymen eventually "found" their belief again and survived their dark nights of the soul. Mother T did not survive hers, as even her defender and book compiler Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk admits when he says she felt the spark of the divine "neither in her heart or [sic] in the eucharist." She claimed to have no belief in God but still yielded to the covenants of an institution that makes such belief the sine qua non of membership. What else to call this but a life rooted in denial and falsehood? Saintliness denotes human exceptionalism. In this light, Mother T seems below-average to me.

Even if one thinks she did good work, continuing to view her as a public relations juggernaut of the Vatican is like viewing Ted Haggard as the poster child of womanizing.

"Whatever New York City firehouse or pub that long ago shut its doors to an attention-starved Bill Donohue."

Hey hey hey...please mind Jewcy's resident Hibernophile. Surely we can knock Donohue without telling him to go back to the pub where he belongs. Ireland has only the third-highest per capita consumption of beer in Europe, and haven't you read How the Irish Saved Civilization? The proper stereotype of an Irishman is that he's always bravely transcribing classical and Christian writings while fending off sub-literate Germanic monkeys. You try that, Weiss!

Well, Donohue's the one who keeps insisting that an Englishman can't interrupt an Irishman in that YouTube. You can't mug up to the Micks and not expect people to read you as your own worst stereotype.

The Romans found Hibernia pretty inhospitable, and those Irish supermonks might still be hiding in bogs waiting for their day of vengeance, so pissing them off could be deleterious...and one never knows if we will again need them to prevent  "the sub-literate German monkeys" from savagely cataloging every manuscript in Europe in perfect detail.

After these stunning revelations about MT, I guess we have to conclude that The Ghoul of Calcutta's "sinister" and "wicked" acts in life (as described by Hitch) were in fact not inspired by religous faith (since, you know, she apparently didn't have any). It had to have been something else.

This gets to the heart of what's wrong with Hitch's notion that "religion is the root of all evil" - simply impossible since man created religion, by Hitch's own judgment. Men are the root of all evil and, whether religious or not, are all capable of committing evil acts; the notion that religion is the underlying force of evil is made nonsense by the obvious 20th century examples (unless you consider communism a "religion" in which we might as well just throw out all the rules).

Best part of the clip: Hitchens noting the unreality of Donohue ever becoming a professor.

I thought the professor comment was pretty snotty. Best part for me was Hitchens muttering "It's been tried" after Donohue said "An Englishman has to listen when an Irishman speaks in public." Ha! Now that's ethnic snobbery at its most laconic and funniest.

I'll have to read some of the actual diary, but on the face of it I've got to go with John DiMascio and Donohue on this one. When Donohue said "This is absurd, next I bet we'll learn that she was a sinner," those were pretty much my own thoughts. A person who writes a letter to God begging for the faith that she so lacks or to feel his presence in the way she never does is no atheist. An atheist thinks the very idea of writing to God or lamenting a lack of belief in God is ludicrous.

The feelings she expressed in the excerpt in Michael's post aren't unusual among believers, but their persistence and intensity make me wonder not whether she was an atheist, but whether she was clinically depressed and spent her entire adult life trying to earn divine release through good works.

There's a great book to be written about how struggle against mental illness has produced some of history's most influential religious figures. Not because they're "crazy," but because they're suffering, they desperately want the suffering to end, and since they understand the suffering in religious terms they've got the motivation to go to extreme theoretical (St. Ignatius, Martin Luther) or other (maybe Mother Theresa) lengths to accomplish that.

Gregory C., I didn't say "sub-literate German monkeys," but "sub-literate GermanIC monkeys." Don't worry, I can say that because I'm a Germanic-speaker. If the Germans had been around back then to catalog manuscripts, then the Irish supermonks would have been assed out of the precious works preservation market, and they probably would have just opened pubs or went on the dole, the lazy Fenian bastards.

Anyway.

Yes, Pat Donahue is an arrogant blowhard.  And so is Hitchens, taking smug satisfaction in the existential suffering of a nun who can't snap her fingers and find God (as if any religion claims Him to be so easily accessible).  So of course, the mainstream media milks these two blowhards for all they're worth, making sure that no one who views the piece can learn anything at all from it.  Which is why I don't spend $35 a month on cable.

MT's Church was founded by a man who doubted Christ even though he knew him in life, so why is it such a "revelation" that one who follows in St. Peter's footsteps would also doubt? 

And why does it matter if she continued to doubt until the day of her death (although no one will ever know if she found faith in her final moments as her consciousness receded)?  If the New Testament can be said to bring any guaranties to the righteous, it is that they may find relief from suffering AFTER death, not answers in this life.  And to the extent that MT's doubts instilled humility (a quality no CNN talking head would recognize if it hit him in the face), I'd say that God did a pretty good job stacking the deck in MT's favor. 

 I have no idea if MT was a saint or sinner, and frankly I find the whole debate academic.  And I won't even begin to take sides in the debate about whether there is a God.  But what I do know from MT's writings is that she was a true seeker--chasing after God even when He seemed no where to be found, unafraid to face her existential doubts, rather than hiding them behind a veneer of fundamentalist zeal.  What's more, she was willing to devote her whole life to that chase.  In that she's an inspiration.  

--Z

Michael,

Her statement starts out and remains a prayer throughout the text you quote. There in lies her faith and redemption. Would she be crying out to God is she did not believe he was there??

Faith is not a feeling, nor is it a spark.   Biblical faith the Greek word Pistis is more than an assurance that is felt in mind or the heart. It is obedience done without knowing.

This woman despite her inner doubts acted in faith, even if she didn't feel it.

That is faith in action.

It's not that she merely "doubted" her faith, or only did so early in life or only on a few occasions. "I have no faith" she wrote, "even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness," and she apparently felt this way for most of her life, up until her last breath. It was more than just doubt, it was a life-long unbelief.

So, if she had no faith in God, then doesn't that mean she didn't believe in God? And if not, then what the hell's the difference?

There can be a world of difference between "I have no faith in God" and "I don't believe in God." Faith has all kinds of religious connotations that believe doesn't have in equal measure (though it can take on some of them, like when one person tells another, "I believe in you.") 

"Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me?" is a honking reference to Jesus' final words on the cross. She feels like she's being crucified. She's suffering profoundly and God has done nothing to alleviate that suffering, she feels like he's rewarded all her service to him by casting her aside like "the one," like Satan. She's in pain, and she's pissed off at God.

Donohue said that she said she was married to God, and he wasn't an easy husband. And when she says "I have no faith in you," it really does sound more to me like a wife telling the selfish, neglectful husband who she used to think would change, "I have no faith in you anymore," and not much like what I mean when I say, "I don't believe in God."

An excellent description, John, of a mechanical search, divorced from conviction, for something that offers no evidence for its existence. In what other realm but the religious would such behavior be considered praiseworthy instead of obsessive-compulsive?

Perhaps you're familiar with the sonnet in which Shakespeare "trouble[s] deaf heaven with [his] bootless cries." Mother Teresa did that, too. But the genius of Stratford had another person, alluded to in the sonnet, on whom he could reflect to take comfort in the cold silence of heaven. Not so, the missionary of Calcutta. Her whole existence was bound with the Church and its hidebound traditions. Her "love" may have been for Jesus, but she was married to an institution. One doesn't envy her agony, which wasn't just over her own intellectual and emotional struggle but over her credibility in the eyes of millions who had come to rely on her. I keep trying to find a way out of the analogy to Communism, but I can't.

And what do we make of her confession, "I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony."  What words and thoughts do you suppose she meant beyond what she already put down?  If doubting one's faith is a yawning commonplace of Catholicism, not to mention a nice off-ramp into future sainthood, why the "untold" agony? 

Michael, spiritual struggles are not the airless geometries your characterizations suggest. Perhaps all your beliefs rest contentedly in perfect equipoise, but many of us struggle with the messy contradictions with which life insists on burdening us from time to time.

Maybe an example from intellectual history, far removed from the murky waters of faith, will help. Copernicus' observations did not demolish geocentrism straightaway because, among other reasons, geocentrism explained the whole physical world quite well. No one challenged C's observations, but while heliocentrism did a better job of explaining celestial phenomena, it was dumb regarding, e.g., why fire went up and stones fell down-until Newton, anyway. Pre-Copernican physics rendered the whole world coherent, and heliocentrism was part of the package; it would have been insanely costly to throw out this system just to save a few epicycles.

In a similar way, her beliefs may have so organized the world for MT, may have explained so much for her, that she could tolerate her doubts and suspicions-her disconfirmations. Or maybe she just thought that the greatest good was accomplished if people acted as if the spirit of a Jew crucified 2000 yrs ago were still around, asking us to be kind. Nutty talk as far as I'm concerned, but then I haven't built any hospitals or succored any leprous orphans lately.

To compare her conflicts, however they may or may not resonate with you, to the mendacities or self-delusion of some apologist for Stalin strikes me as kind of tone-deaf, and I'm by no means a person of faith.

In any event, I'll see your Rolling Stones and raise you a Billy Bragg: "Virtue never tested is not virtue at all."

I don't the mental illness or the eventual moment of recognition that God has a "plan" in what's been revealed of Mother Teresa's struggle.  There are conflicts with God, struggles to believe, certainly,  but she clearly realized that her own crossed the threshold occasional doubt or confusion.  Her struggle did not appear to be one with the notion of God, or with a figure she clearly believed in, but with totalizing faith demanded by the institution she served. Michael's Communism analogy does make sense for precisely this reason. 

The widespread struggle Copernican physics is only partly analagous, for Ptolemaic astronomy was not a totalizing world-system but one aspect of such a system that had been challenged previously (particularl in Islamic Spain).  Copernican "cosmology"provided a believable and useful model that enabled people to reject Ptolemaic science and to have a new scientific system to fill the void.  Conversely for many who struggled within the instutions of a Communist state, none of the alternatives really offered as complete a system.  Further, Mother Teresa, like the Stalinists, had done of all work on behalf of an institution, in her case the Church, not just an idea (God).  So while she struggled with whether or not her ideology was correct, she also struggled with the burden of a being a representative of an instution predicated upon that ideology.  In the same way, many in Communist institutions struggled not just (or always) from doubts about Marxism/Bolshevism, but from concerns about representing the physical institutions that embodied these in a complete, all-encompassing system (the Stalinist state).  The analogy here is quite close. 

Now my faith is half-restored. Interesting allusion, Anon, to "Must I Paint You a Picture," which is also about a painful and irrevocable break-up.

I agree with you wholeheartedly when you say:

In a similar way, her beliefs may have so organized the world for MT, may have explained so much for her, that she could tolerate her doubts and suspicions-her disconfirmations. Or maybe she just thought that the greatest good was accomplished if people acted as if the spirit of a Jew crucified 2000 yrs ago were still around, asking us to be kind.

So organized the world, couldn't tolerate her doubts, the greatest good was accomplished.... It's as if you were playing Mad Libs with my Recovering Totalitarian Test.

You mischaracterize my analogy a bit when you say ex-Communists were "apologists for Stalin." They were apologists for a totalist system of thought and analysis that they found incompatible with the realities of Stalinism. That's why they became heretics and, in most cases, were murdered for their heresy.

Ibn Warraq was once at least as zealous a believer as Mother T, albeit in Islam. He's written that the most recognizable historical tradition with which to compare his spiritual unraveling is that of ex-Communism, a la Koestler. My observation is by no means an original one.

Joey: 'Donohue said that she said she was married to God, and he wasn't an easy husband. And when she says "I have no faith in you," it really does sound more to me like a wife telling the selfish, neglectful husband who she used to think would change, "I have no faith in you anymore," and not much like what I mean when I say, "I don't believe in God."'

Well, that sounds like "white noise" to me also, esp. since she never wrote "in you" - she only wrote "I have no faith" meaning she doesn't have any faith or *belief* in Jesus aka God. Comparing God to a "neglectful husband" seems to me ridiculous.

And if these were mere commonplace "doubts" about her religion that she had, why did the Catholic Church see it fit to give the woman a Poltergeist-style exorcism in order to "cure" her of her apparent unbelief?

Also, I don't think she was "pissed off" at God at all. Quite the contrary. She just didn't believe in any of it, it's that simple. She wanted to believe in Him. She wanted to like HIM...but ultimately she just couldn't bring herself to do so.

Hitchens is perfectly right about all this, and about how shameful it was of the Catholic Church to keep encouraging her. I just hope he retracts his "religious belief is the root of evil" theory...

Has anyone else noticed that Weiss's ("touchy's") so-called "Recovering Totalitarian Test" is totally incohrent? I just ask...

Mark G: You say, "Comparing God to a 'neglectful husband' seems to me ridiculous." Yes, to me as well. But clearly not to Mother Theresa. She seems to have incessantly characterized her relationship to God/Jesus as a marriage, and also deeply resented his "casting her aside" despite her devotion.

"She just didn't believe in any of it, it's that simple." I just see no grounds whatsoever for drawing that conclusion. According to the Time article, only twice in all of her letters did she ever allude to the possibility that God didn't exist. Everything else is about the emptiness and darkness she felt, the lack of God's presence in her life and in her soul, and her lack of faith. To be honest, I'm a little perplexed that anyone interprets that as an expression of atheism. All I can tell you is that I lived six years in a Catholic country, and those sorts of statements sound nothing to me like the words of a Catholic-turned-atheist, and everything like the words of a Catholic who's in pain but thinks God exists.

You understand, of course, that I don't give two shits whether Mother Theresa was an atheist, a Catholic who lived in a constant state of orgasmic joy at the bounty of God's love, or a closet worshiper of Loki the Norse trickster god. In fact, the last would be my preference. If her diaries had revealed that, now that would have been just a kick-ass revelation. But from what I've seen I don't think her diaries revealed  atheism, so much as they've revealed that, unsurprisingly, some atheists are tone-deaf to religious language.

Joey: "Everything else is about the emptiness and darkness she felt, the lack of God's presence in her life and in her soul, and her lack of faith."

Her lack of faith in God, right? Her lack of belief. I still don't think anyone has adequately explained the difference. Perhaps, as an atheist, I am tone-deaf to religious language, which is why I'm asking someone to explain this apparent mystery in plain English.

I don't think her comments are an expression of "atheism" but they are an expression of agnosticism (the lack of faith in God without denying the possibility that HE exists).

If it makes any difference, I was raised in a Catholic family and had to stage an escape in high school. I never really understood the white noise.