c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Mother Teresa’s detractors are swarming again, led by atheist author Christopher Hitchens, whose dark diatribe against religion, “God is Not Great,” is especially critical of people who think God is, in fact, great.

In 1995, Hitchens wrote a scathingly critical book about Mother Teresa called “The Missionary Position,” charging she controlled large amounts of money yet still provided sub-standard care to the poor. He was horrified she was not working to alleviate poverty, but rather sought to spread the gospel. Hitchens’ secular ears heard only what he wanted: her maddening (to some) insistence that secular means of addressing human suffering were not enough, and were none of her business.

But Hitchens and others could not hear her down-to-earth understanding _ seen most recently in the collection of her private writings, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light” _ that Christianity had to be freed of its European influence to effectively serve in India.

When Mother Teresa began her missionary order 60 years ago, Calcutta had large convents, hospitals, and schools mostly serving the upper classes. Indian women who became nuns had to adapt to their European ways. Mother Teresa proposed something different to her skeptical archbishop: native-Indian Missionaries of Charity who would “live their days in the slums and streets.” She wrote that she and her sisters would live and work “close to the peoples’ heart … in the dirty and dark holes of the street beggars.”

I met the woman now known as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta 20 years ago, and spent an entire day with her. She was an astonishingly magnetic personality, fully aware of the “fame” she wore lightly. She was totally present to others, and gently aware of her effect on them.

Pope John Paul II beatified her in 2003, just six years after her death. The next step is canonization, and her “cause,” as it is termed, may be helped by news of her spiritual dryness.

The recent “news” about Mother Teresa experiencing a “dark night of the soul” is not exactly new. Nor is it unusual. Most of the world seems to agree that if saints exist, she surely must be one. Her dark night found her in an empty tunnel questioning the existence of God. Her senses, once filled with understanding of God and God’s care for her and for all creation, were empty of such knowledge.

The world knew nothing of Mother Teresa’s interior suffering during her life. When Time magazine interviewed her in 1989, 18 years before her death at the age of 87, she pointed to her work _ and not herself _ as the reason for her notoriety: “People are responding not because of me, but because of what we’re doing,” she said. “Before, people were speaking much about the poor, but now more and more people are speaking to the poor. That’s the great difference. The work has created this.”

At the time of the interview, 23,000 hopeless, homeless people had died in the Missionaries of Charity’s Kalighat Home for the Dying, a simple hostel in an abandoned temple to Kali, the Hindu goddess of transition and destroyer of demons. Thousands more have followed them. The stream of dying poor seems endless.

But now, from his comfortable Washington perch, Hitchens is at it again (most recently in the pages of Newsweek), criticizing Mother Teresa and her followers for doing what no one else wants to do, and especially their reasons for doing so. That may be understandable. Many shake their heads at the ways her sisters live and work. The sophisticated world cannot comprehend how she lived, or why she lectured on the evils of abortion when she received the Nobel Prize in 1979.

Mother Teresa was not sophisticated. But she was smart _ very smart. She was aware _ super aware. She was also very simple in her understanding of Christ’s presence in the world in and through every person.

That she did not “feel” God’s presence mattered not to her. That is the mark of the genuine dark night. She saw Christ present in every single person whom she met. And that is what Christianity is all about.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books on Catholic studies.)

KRE/CM END ZAGANO

700 words

A photo of Phyllis Zagano is available via https://religionnews.com.