Mother Teresa doubts her own faith?

Question

I just heard about this today. What are your opinions and/or thoughts on this?

I can't find the link. It was on AOL's HomePage this morning.

Answer 1

Mother Teresa is dead, which means she more than doubts her own faith... she KNOWS she was a wee bit on the el wrongo side.

EDIT; Why Jes-say! How nice to be beneath a saint. Remember when they won in New Orleans after Katrina? I was beneath the whole lot of them then too!

In a huge way I agree with Jim D. below me. The only thing I would disagree with was that ANY of us knew exactly what kind of work she actually did. Why? Because it is journalistically undocumented. From the time of early childhood we hear "Mother Teresa was a saint who helped the lepers" and from there we automatically believe that she must have been near-perfect. No one knows the real Mother Teresa, her passion or her motives. I do know she wrote, "In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist." And this introspection, this admission of fallibility, makes her seem a bit more human, which is a relief to me. No one is a saint in my book. Except my girlfriend. She is.

Answer 2

It's usually the people that study religion the deepest end up having the most doubts. A lot of men leave Seminary schools as atheists because they learned too much and asked too many questions. Mother Teresa spent her whole life focused on religion, so she had to have times where she had doubts.

Answer 3

Intelligent people often have thoughs and ideas misunderstood by the faithful.

I am not surprised that she engaged in introspection; such a practice is for the thoughtful individual. She was informed enough to witness firsthand the glaring short comings of both the dogma and those who claimed a special, if unproven, ability to speak for god.

I find it laughable that an organization which invented the idea of a “saint” would have to ponder the worthiness of an individual which by her own life was superior to most of the men dominating her faith.

I witness the preponderance of nonachievers, and sanctimonious, self important, pseudo-moralistic strutting peacocks of Catholicism’s political hierarchy, indulging themselves in their delusions of self worth while at the same time depreciating her verified and world witnessed good works.

The church at its finest hour.

Jim D

Answer 4

I bring news in a spiteful way about Mother Teresa (fans, please move to the next post)

Mother Teresa's canonisation is currently on hold, because of serious accusations made against her.

The Vatican launched a large investigation concerning her and her organisation's association with abortion clinics bombings. She always spoke loudly against abortion and associated it with nazi exterminations and never hid her disgust of people who approved of it. She was scolded at least once by the Vatican to tone down her opinions about it.

The investigation started shortly after her death.

I'm sorry I can't give you any news-references about it, since I read the case about 1 ½ years ago and it was kept very quiet, so there's very little trace of it.

Answer 5

It was on CNN and I'm sure still there.

It said something along the lines of her telling a close confidant that she didn't always feel his presence. And I imagine she didn't when you consider the places she ministered in the world. No one feels God's presence in their lives all of the time. I think this "revelation" about her makes her an excellent example of what faith is all about. Faith is trusting and believing what can't be felt or seen - it's continuing on even when there's no evidence. Mother Teresa was human, but I'm cool with thinking of her as a Saint as well.

Answer 6

Everybody has doubts from time to time. That's a basic part of having a faith.... faith gets challenged. Picture yourself as a tired old lady, working half a century in desolate conditions, watching the horrendous suffering of people who do not deserve it.

How could she not have the occasional crisis of faith? But just as with St. John of the Cross, droughts of faith often lead to a deepened and more mature faith.

Show me the religious person who says they never have doubts, and I will show you a person who has no genuine faith at all.

Answer 7

"Mother" Teresa was a fraud.

http://www.randi.org/jr/102502.html
Is a Mother Teresa-inspired miracle that's been recognized by the Vatican a complete and utter fraud? Absolutely, says the husband of a woman whose purported tumor vanished after she applied a medallion of the beloved nun to the site of her pain. "My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle," Seiku Besra told Time magazine.

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=shields_18_ 1
When Mother spoke publicly, she never asked for money, but she did encourage people to make sacrifices for the poor, to "give until it hurts." Many people did - and they gave it to her. We received touching letters from people, sometimes apparently poor themselves, who were making sacrifices to send us a little money for the starving people in Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor children in India. Most of the money sat in our bank accounts.

http://www.salon.com/sept97/news/news3970905.html
What about her celebrated concern for the poor and the weak? Here the record is much murkier than her saintly image would suggest. I have been shown testimony from leading American and British physicians, expressing their concern at the extremely low standard of medicine practiced in her small Calcutta clinics. No pain killers, syringes washed in cold water, a fatalistic attitude toward death and a strict regimen for the patients. No public accounts were made available by her "missionaries of Charity" but enormous sums are known to have been raised. The income from such awards as the Nobel Prize is alone enough to maintain a sizable operation. In one on-the-record interview, Mother Teresa spoke with pride of having opened more than 500 convents in 125 countries, "not counting India." It seemed more than probable that money donated by well-wishers for the relief of suffering was being employed for the purpose of religious proselytizing by the "missionary multinational."

Answer 8

We are human beings,and subject too all things,we all have clay feet. I will not judge her,I know that in time the doubts were removed. I do not know what the plan is, but I do know the Planner

Answer 9

liberty11235 makes a good point -- even those who claim to believe in god, don't believe in him all the time, because they just can't.

I've never cared much for MT -- I still don't -- but that story was impressive for its honesty. Clearly it was painful for her to write those words, even if they were never intended for publication.

Now if only she could have been equally forthright in public.

Answer 10

Yea.. If her works here on earth wasnt Christ motivated. They will burn like twigs and branches in heaven.

1 CORINTHIANS 3:13-15 Every man's work shall be made manifest; for the Day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work, of what sort it is.

3:14 -If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon he shall recive a reward.

3:15- If anyone's work is burned, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.