First of all, I’m not Catholic, so I feel a bit unprepared to write about Mother Teresa, someone who was beatified by Pope John Paul II and whose 10th anniversary of her death will be tomorrow, 9/5. So I won’t concentrate on her that much. However, if the last issues of Time and Newsweek are any guide, the MSM is just giddy over the release of the letters of Mother Teresa, especially of those that indicate that she had suffered a “crisis of faith” for the better part of her last 50 years.

In Time, the article is titled Her Agony (Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith) the piece opens with a showcase of two contradicting statements that she made, and then concludes:

[T]hat one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

And in fact, that appears to be the case. 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.”

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and–except for a five-week break in 1959–never abated.

After reading through the online version of this article, I don’t feel the bias as much as I did looking at the printed version in my wife’s office copy. There, sub-heads and image captions hit you time and time again with the message that Mother Teresa had nearly or nearly so lost her faith — a quick Cliff’s Notes type message to article browsers as opposed to readers. I’m used to this in the LA Times, where headlines often contradict article content, misleading the casual reader.

Not at all vague in slant is the Christopher Hitchens’ piece in in Newsweek, Teresa, Bright and Dark, where he asks was Mother Teresa:

[A] confused old lady who it [the Church] knew had for all practical purposes ceased to believe?

Hitchens, atheist author of the best selling god Is Not Great and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice has nothing much good to say about any religion or faith so I wouldn’t expect any less from him. It’s the timing, that Newsweek felt that this article should be published on the 10th anniversary of her death, that reveals the Newsweek editors’ own anti-religious bias, normally trotted out each Christmas and Easter. If they had any real editorial balls, they’d run an anti-Islam piece on the birthday of Mohammed, but that would take some actual courage. Not lost on these MSM decision makers is that Catholics and Protestants are not running wild in the world beheading and stoning those that berate Christ and the Church — so Christians are fair game.

Hugh Hewitt highlights a reply to Hitchens from Dr. Anthony Lilles, Academic Dean, St. John Vianney Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado.

Whenever someone harshly criticizes a great person, they usually reveal to us more about themselves and their own culture than they actually do about the person they think they understand. This is difficult not to see in Christopher Hitchens’s article, Teresa, Bright and Dark. Although a very intelligent critic of her life, this author betrays a misunderstanding of her faith in general and a bias against her community of faith in particular. Both his bias and his misunderstanding completely color his interpretation of her experience — for him, she is as pathetic as the Church she promoted.

I have to admit, I seem unable to understand the mind of those that have zero faith. What I believe that Hitchens’ article shows is that he has zero understanding of the minds of those that do. Lilles believes that Hitchens’ completely missed the point of Mother Teresa’s life.

By her faith, what Mother Teresa did what every great man and woman has done, and every true Christian seeks to do. That is this: to live for others. She chose to do this in the context of her faith, even when her emotions and understanding could not support her. Here, the mystery of Mother Teresa’s faith is much richer than Hitchens sees. For Christians, faith means specifically to imitate Christ: to accept God’s love even when it cannot be felt and to love as he commanded even when it does not seem to make sense to do so. By her faith, even when she could not feel God’s love and wondered whether it was real at all, Mother Teresa chose to believe in that love enough to reach out to the world: to the lonely, to the abandoned, to the dying, and to the poorest of the poor. For Hitchens living out such a decision is a scandal. For Christians, it is the mystery of the Cross.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Catholicism, Media Bias. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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