The rush to canonize Mother Teresa of Calcutta ought to be reconsidered, if only to provide time to distinguish popular perceptions from reality. Both supporters and opponents of her canonization often operate from mistaken understandings of the nature of her work and her interior life. Without prejudging the question of her sainthood, we should set the relevant facts straight so that the subject considered is the real person, not popular myth.
The most striking contrast between perception and reality concerns the nature of Mother Teresa’s vocation among the poor. Contrary to their name, the Missionaries of Charity are not a charity in the common sense. They have no infrastructure to adequately feed, clothe, house, or otherwise materially help the poor. They do not provide disaster relief, nor do they found hospices. Their ministry to the poor is almost entirely spiritual, with only minimal material aid. This can be seen most notably in their care for the dying. Those who are not admitted to hospitals receive palliative care from the sisters, inadequate to the task of healing, but sufficient to prepare for death. In some cases, care involves little more than the comfort of dying in the presence of a human face. This may not be what many people consider the most effective form of helping the poor, but there are other organizations to provide material relief, whereas Mother Teresa had a spiritual vocation, insisting she was not a social worker. One might as well fault the police department for failing to put out fires as accuse the Missionaries of Charity of neglecting the material needs of the poor. Even less pertinent is the well-worn criticism that their upholding of Church teaching on contraception and abortion opposed the interests of the poor, as if these practices were a social panacea. The eugenic solution to poverty is not morally obligatory.
Be that as it may, the Missionaries of Charity have received tens of millions of dollars, including many donations from people who believe the order to have the mission of providing substantial material relief. Given this wealth of resources and the donors’ intent, it is arguable that the order is obligated to direct these funds to provide material aid to the poor, if not directly, then by redirecting funds to an organization equipped to do so. While there are no accusations of corruption, there is the possibility of negligence by allowing donations to accumulate without any plan for their use.
The second area of profound contrast between perception and reality concerns Mother Teresa’s spiritual life. Here we must tread carefully, for the real person appears to be an amalgam of the external persona and the troubled soul revealed in her letters, rather than one over the other.
If one were to judge solely from her most despairing letters, we would conclude that Mother Teresa was weak in faith, doubting God’s presence when she was denied overt spiritual consolations. This sense of darkness or divine absence dated from the 1940s, when she left her convent to follow her special vocation to help the poor. Deprived of the consolations of life in her convent and perhaps hopeful that the spiritual experience of her divine calling would be followed by a life of special consolations such as those known by contemplatives, she was faced with the barren horror of poverty and despair without any consoling angels to strengthen her. Then she spoke of God as one who is absent, her soul as filled with darkness, and at times even questioning the basic propositions of the faith: the presence of God, the existence of the soul, the fidelity of Christ.
It is arrant sophistry to suggest that these doubts are signs of great faith. The illogical idea that doubt is essential to faith comes from existential Protestant thinkers and is foreign to the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. As Cardinal Newman said, to hold a dogma subject to question is to have already lost the faith. Mother Teresa herself plainly admitted at many times to have had “no faith”. This is a serious condition, incompatible with the state of grace. It goes beyond the sorrows of the saints in the absence of spiritual consolation, the so-called “dark night of the soul.” It is one thing to feel abandoned by God, and quite another to lose faith in His Providence. Doubting the faith is not an example for Christians to live by; Mother Teresa herself knew this, so she kept these letters secret and asked that they be destroyed.
As grave as this interior darkness may be, it is not the entire story of Mother Teresa’s spiritual life. Her own statements and those of her closest confidants, including those aware of her secret struggles, attest clearly to many acts of faith, whether in prayers of gratitude for divine blessings, teaching sisters to love Christ, and above all, scrupulously obeying the demands of the faith. It is in this last aspect of her life that Mother Teresa’s greatest merit is to be found, for she always obeyed, even when she was in internal turmoil. Thus her definitive acts of volition were those of faith, as her doubts were never strong enough to sway her from her vocation. While external acts do not compensate for lack of faith, her testimony and that of her confidants give numerous examples of a simple, certain faith that she held throughout life, though not unfailingly.
The real Mother Teresa is a complex character with a vocation quite different from her popular image. Before deciding whether she is the sort of character to be counted among the canonical saints, we should be clear about our subject, and not mythologize her into a person of unfailing faith, nor misconstrue her mission as simple philanthropy.