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_ Prof. Jonez _
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> Mother Teresa doubted God's existence
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> Agence France-Presse
> Last updated 08:56am (Mla time) 08/26/2007
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> 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."
