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Mother Teresa’s cause advances . . .
But Vatican official counsels patience
The letters and diaries of
Mother Teresa,
now being published by an Indian theological journal, show a woman who rose and
fell through spiritual highs and lows over her life and even felt temptation to
abandon her work.
The documents were part of the collection prepared for a report for the official cause of her canonization, which has now been sent to the Vatican. Excerpts of Mother Teresa’s writings—from before she founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1946 to just before her death in 1997—appeared in the March 2001 issue of Vidyajyoti (Light of Knowledge), a journal published in New Delhi by the Society of Jesus.
Describing tears of loneliness, and the pain of the dark night of the soul, Mother Teresa never stopped writing of her longing for God and her desire to be used completely by him. She also never stopped working, expanding her order to more than 100 countries and winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
“She confesses frequently that in her darkness she was unable to pray,” yet she encouraged her nuns to pray for personal union with Jesus, remarked Father Joseph Neuner, the theologian who wrote the article and was a friend of Mother Teresa. “This cleaving to each other, Jesus and I, is prayer,” Mother Teresa wrote in 1966. As she walked about the slums of Calcutta, she constantly told God how much she longed for him.
“Experiences of darkness are found in many lives of mystics,” Father Neuner commented. “Some experience of darkness is part of every spiritual life.” Still, he conceded, “it may be difficult to find a parallel to the lifelong night which enwrapped Teresa.”
When she first set out to found the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa’s diaries show, she was tempted to return to Europe, writing of “all the beautiful things and comforts, the people they mix with, in a word everything.” But she resolved to remain on her mission. “Of free choice, my God, and out of love for you, I desire to remain and do whatever be your holy will in my regard,” she wrote in 1949.
Some of the most agonized writings come from 1959 and 1960, when Father T. Picachy, the future Archbishop of Calcutta, was her spiritual director and had asked her to write out her thoughts. “Now, Jesus, I go the wrong way,” she wrote. She continued:
They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of loss of God. In my soul, I feel just the terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing. Jesus, please forgive the blasphemy—I have been told to write everything—that darkness that surrounds me on all sides. I can’t lift my soul to God: No light, no inspiration enters my soul.
Mother Teresa eventually came to an understanding that her spiritual journey led to joy, even though it must pass through darkness; she realized the parallels with the Passion of Christ. “I have begun to love my darkness, for I believe now that it is a part, a very small part, of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth,” she wrote in the early 1990s.
While an Indian journal was publishing these revealing insights into the life of a woman who is already widely regarded as a saint, a key Vatican official cautioned the faithful not to be impatient in awaiting her beatification. Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, the prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, told the Italian daily Avvenire that the cause of Mother Teresa still required a great deal of investigation. Moreover, he added—despite several recent published reports—the miracle attributed to the intercession of the famous nun has not yet been formally recognized as authentic.
The cause of Mother Teresa is still in an early stage, the cardinal pointed out. Her cause was only opened in August of this year, and although the investigation by the Calcutta diocese has been concluded, the documents collected there must now be edited and approved by the Vatican Congregation. Since there are 80 volumes of documents in the dossier, Cardinal Martins observed, “this stage will take a lot of time.”
Similarly, the formal approval of a miracle attributed to the intercession of Mother Teresa could be a time-consuming process, taking up as much as “several years,” the prelate said. He explained that the facts of the case would be presented to a team of doctors, to be studied exhaustively. Only after the doctors affirm that the cure appears miraculous is the case passed on to theologians and to the members of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
Back to Catholic World Report November 2001 Table of Contents