Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t saints have to believe in “God”? Isn’t that part of the job description?

The reason I ask is because Mother Teresa has been beatified and is progressing rapidly towards sainthood, all while being an undercover atheist!

A new book titled Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light consists primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for nearly the last half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever.

In one of the letters to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. “Jesus has a very special love for you,” she assured Van Der Peet. “[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear…”

Let’s examine some more of her words:

“Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. 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.”[2]

“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. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?” [2]

In  1956, she said:

“Such deep longing for God — and … repulsed — empty — no faith — no love — no zeal. — [The saving of] Souls holds no attraction — Heaven means nothing — pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything.” [2]

“What do I labour for? If there be no God — there can be no soul — if there is no Soul then Jesus — You also are not true“, she said in 1959. [2]

In 1962, she wrote:

“If I ever become a Saint — I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from Heaven — to [light] the light of those in darkness on earth,”. [2]

Mother Teresa was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person. Teresa finally woke up, although she could not admit it. She was acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. “The smile,” she writes, is “a mask” or “a cloak that covers everything.” [2]

As for the “miracle” that had to be attested, what can one say? A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of Mother Teresa, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn’t have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican’s investigators? No!

Now, let’s examine the “good” that she brought to the word. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. She called abortion “the greatest destroyer of peace” to the audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She demanded a state constitutional ban on divorce and remarriage in 1996. [3][4]

So much for respecting the rights of women…

Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty: the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

In the end, Mother Teresa was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud! The Catholic Church must be very proud of their latest, Godless saint.

Related article: The Hypocrisy of the Clergy

Thanks for reading,

Notes:

1. Mother Teresa’s canonization not at risk: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=T5ATF2NJTRSSDQFIQMFCFFOAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2007/08/24/wteresa224.xml
2. Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html
3. Mommie Dearest: The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud: http://www.slate.com/id/2090083/
4. The Nobel Prize in Peace 1979, Mother Teresa: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html