MetaFilter posts tagged with motherteresa

Mother Teresa's lengthy, unresolved crisis of faith

ibmcginty — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:54:30 -0800

From a Time magazine article: A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. 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 the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist." Previously on Mother Teresa's doubt, more generally.

The Making of a Saint

Eloquence — Sat, 18 Oct 2003 21:11:11 -0800

The Final Verdict. Mother Teresa will be beatified today. While the media mostly uncritically reproduced even the wildest claims about her life and work, Calcutta-born writer Aroup Chatterjee has the hard facts on her case. Unlike Christopher Hitchens' polemic "The Missionary Position", Chatterjee's book is full of citations and paints a grim picture of the "gutter saint". The entire book, sans pictures, is available for free online. The reality: Aside from her fanatical opposition to abortion, condoms and the pill, which dominated much of her life since the 1970s, her order's activities often did more harm than help, it celebrates pain and suffering to an absurd extent, and was not involved at all in the major crises and disasters of the subcontinent. If you don't have time to read 400 pages, the Wikipedia article about her gives a much more balanced picture than most media reports.

alloneword — Tue, 15 Oct 2002 07:54:08 -0800

Mother Teresa fingered This is actually a rather shocking story because the criteria for a miracle at Lourdes, for example, are very strict. That's why there are so few of them.

xmutex — Tue, 01 Oct 2002 15:25:05 -0800

Mother Teresa "cures" cancer, on her way to sainthood. Clearly cancer sufferers need only to pray to Mother Terresa to cure cancer! This story forces us to deal with the most crucial of questions-- why is religion so goofy?