The Reactionary Utopian

Mother Teresa’s Doubts

September 4, 2007

It now transpires, to the shock (or delight) of many in the news media, that Mother Teresa of Calcutta had, at times, severe doubts about her Catholic faith. A new book of her letters and journals, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, quotes words she wrote at the depth of her despair. In 1979 she confided that “the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” She also accused herself of “hypocrisy” for publicly affecting a stronger belief than she actually had.

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All this seems to come as no surprise to her most famous detractor, Christopher Hitchens, who has called her “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud” and now gloats to learn that she had doubts just like other people. Well, then, shouldn’t he at least retract the charge of fanaticism? Fanatics aren’t troubled by doubts. His portrait of her as a credulous fool is exploded by the new revelations.

Having one’s faith tested has always been a normal part of Christian, and pre-Christian Jewish, life. Jesus had severe doubts in the Garden of Gethsemane; on the cross he quoted the opening words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (The rest of the psalm gives the answer.) The apostle Thomas doubted the Resurrection until he saw the risen Jesus with his own eyes. The epistles of Paul and others also deal with the struggle of faith with doubt: “For now we see as in a glass, darkly.”

Changing the bedpans of dying beggars in Calcutta for many years would try anyone’s faith. Even an atheist might finally yield to a sense of futility. Not that the atheists gave Mother Teresa much competition, as far as I know. If Hitchens ministers to the poor in Calcutta, he’s probably the exception; the only anti-poverty program he has ever supported was Communism.

[Breaker quote for Mother Teresa's Doubts: Does God punish our virtues?]

[Breaker quote for Mother Teresa's Doubts: Does God punish our virtues?]

According to Hitchens, believers are gullible and literal-minded, whereas atheists are subtler, with a fine sense of irony. So Mother Teresa, with a simple belief in her heavenly reward, would undertake to minister to the poor mechanically, like an automaton. This view is not only self-congratulatory, but preposterous. The West owes nearly its entire sense of irony to Jesus’ insistent distinction between the inner and outer man, as in the parable of the proud Pharisee’s ostentatious prayer and the humble publican’s self-reproach. He made hypocrisy an especially odious sin. Hitchens seems to have missed the whole point; Mother Teresa certainly didn’t.

“Fraud”? She continued her heroic and holy work for decades when she was unsure that God had even commanded it. If that is hypocrisy, it’s a kind the world could use a lot more of — fraudulently feeding the hungry, fraudulently healing the sick, fraudulently preaching God’s love. You may as well speak of fraudulently giving everything you have to the needy, or of hypocritically allowing yourself to be nailed to a cross.

But say that Mother Teresa was indeed a fraud. Does that also go for all the nameless nuns who have given their lives in her service? Just what has been their cut of the profits? Has keeping the faith been much easier for them? Are they victims of their leader’s deception, or parties to it?

Mother Teresa died ten years ago this week. During her life, I respected her charitable work, but in an odd way I partly agreed with her defamers: I assumed that her belief in Jesus was so untroubled that no outward difficulties could trouble the essential serenity of her soul. My daughter, who met her once, was moved by her radiant sanctity; I wasn’t.

Now I weep with awe and joy at the stupendous triumph of her life over her doubt. I thought she was spared the nagging skepticism that had always gnawed at my own faith. It has taken me until this week to see what an astounding miracle her apparently “untroubled” life was.

But her life was far more troubled than anyone could have imagined — troubled not by conventional skepticism, but by the frustration of her own extraordinary charity. Try to conceive the anguish of feeling that God was actually punishing you for trying to serve him in unbearable circumstances. Then you’ve just begun to appreciate what Mother Teresa endured for much of her long life.

Joseph Sobran

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