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Comments

• [1] Ed Helmrich from Larchmont January 03, 2009 - 12:13PM

  Dear Leonard Lopate,

  This was an excellent show, of course, but your comment about Mother Teresa needs a small comment. You said, in asking about the doubts of Father Judge, that in the recent publication of the letters of Mother Teresa that 'even Mother Teresa had doubts'.

  You have to be careful about this statement. It's clear that Mother Teresa did not feel the Presence of God for many years. She identified this with the experience (called the dereliction) of Jesus on the Cross: "Why have You abandoned me?"). And then it's a question of desperation because you miss God so much. And you wonder if what you're doing has displeased Him.

  This 'desert' experience is common to the mystics, see St. John of the Cross, but it lasted a long time with her. She took her inspiration from this moment of abandonment in Jesus' Life, when He said on the Cross: "I thirst" (for souls).

  But to imply that Mother Teresa had doubts about the existence of God or the truth of the Catholic faith, in a speculative or intellectual sense, is not so. All through her work, she said that she did it for Jesus, and that she only could do it because of His grace and power behind her, that He was the one doing it, she was just cooperating.

  Statements like that about Mother Teresa can trouble people if not explained.