The American Spectator

Much-loved by most of the world — and nearly all of it prior to her famed condemnation of abortion in her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech — Blessed Teresa of Calcutta has once again taken center stage in world opinion. The upcoming publication of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light by Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk details private letters from Mother Teresa to her various spiritual advisors, confessors and to God himself, over the span of 50 years in which she is reported to have suffered what is known as the “dark night of the soul.”

p>In one plaintive missive to Jesus, she asks, “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me?” Time magazine’s David Van Biema gives a somewhat fair and balanced presentation of the matter in a piece this week, but appears concerned that the revelation will be misunderstood by many. He details how priests explained that in her 50 years of dryness: br> /p>

[Mother] Teresa’s inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn’t there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.’s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book’s Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned.

This is typical of some secular opinion on the subject of Mother Teresa’s dark night and her Catholic faith. While this information is not new — much of it was revealed in 2003 during the investigation for her Beatification, when many of her letters were made public — it is the first real notice of it in periodicals like Time . p>Fascinated by the fact that the deeply religious can sometimes experience long stretches of spiritual dryness, Van Biema’s piece then morphs into a psychoanalysis of Mother herself. He also includes the obligatory quote from Christopher Hitchens — whose disdain for Mother Teresa is so obsessive that it may be he who is in need of the couch — which, for the benefit of all, I will exclude here. Van Biema seems mystified by a comforting 1953 letter from an early confessor in answer to her misgivings: br> /p>