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The Reluctant Saint

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.

The Future of Manned Space Flight

The most recent mission of the space shuttle Endeavour has drawn attention once again to the fundamental deficiencies of the shuttle program. Although the damage to Endeavor’s tiles was not a threat to the safety of the crew, it served as a reminder of the problematic basic design of having the orbiter mounted alongside its solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank. Whether the debris striking Endeavour shortly after launch was foam or ice, it clearly came from the mounting bracket, and would not have struck the shuttle had it been possible to mount it atop the boosters and tank, as was the case in the Mercury and Apollo programs. The last shuttle missions will fly in 2010, and hopefully the successor vehicle will correct this basic design flaw, returning to the more successful earlier model, rather than banking on the supposed reusability of the orbiter.

In truth, the space shuttle as it exists is not properly reusable, as many of its parts need to be replaced or rebuilt after each mission, and there are extensive safety inspections needed to find fractures or other failures. NASA’s model of tolerating stress failures of individual parts, so long as they do not fracture sufficiently to cause the loss of a vehicle, and replacing them after each mission, was exposed by Richard Feynman in the wake of the Challenger disaster. At the time, there was an alarming propensity among NASA administrators to overstate the safety factor and grossly underestimate the probability of failure, which we now know from experience to be at least 1 in 100, consistent with the prediction of engineers in the 1980s. A culture of secrecy and concern for public relations prevented realistic assessments of risk, and prevented certain facts about the Challenger disaster from reaching the public. NASA prevented state authorities from performing autopsies on the astronauts, and downplayed evidence that the astronauts likely were alive and conscious during their free fall before impacting the ocean’s surface.

Among Feynman’s findings regarding NASA’s attitude toward safety was the irrational practice of regarding a situation (such as certain structural damage) as safe if missions have been successfully flown in that condition, regardless of any probabilistic assessment of failure. This posture resulted in the Columbia disaster, as NASA engineers mistook the success of previous missions as an indication that there was no intrinsic danger to the model of having the shuttle alongside its rocket boosters. Worse still, although the impact of foam against the shuttle tiles was recognized during the mission, the shuttle was authorized for re-entry, denying the possibility that there was a threat to the vehicle.

Now that the dangers of the space shuttle are more fully and publicly understood, it is increasingly cumbersome and expensive to assure mission safety. The space shuttle is also burdened with antiquated electronics and computer technology, so that its reusability has become a liability. A new manned space vehicle needs to be developed, more along the lines of the earlier successful American programs, and the currently successful Russian model.

The development of a new space vehicle, as part of NASA’s new objective of returning to the moon and landing astronauts on Mars, will undoubtedly limit its ability to fund other endeavors. Already, basic scientific research unrelated to manned spaceflight has seen reduced funding by NASA, even though important questions in astrophysics and particle physics can be explored with unmanned vehicles that are much more cost effective. Manned space flight increases the cost of research well over a hundredfold, and it provides no data that unmanned probes cannot provide, save for the effects of space flight on humans. Such a circular justification should not be the basis for an enormous investment. Even if scientific research on humans in space is necessary, this can be achieved on the International Space Station, which is also in danger of losing NASA funding. Considering that NASA advocated destroying Mir in favor of a new station that would not be in exclusively foreign control, it is understandable that European partners strenuously object to its plans to scuttle the ISS as soon as 2016, only six years after completion. The enormous cost and complexity of the ISS make comparisons to the space shuttle program inevitable, and given NASA’s recent track record, it is unclear whether they are institutionally capable of leaner, more efficient design for the moon and Mars programs.

Perfidious Journalists Need a Latin Lesson

Pope Benedict’s motu proprio authorizing wider use of the Tridentine Rite has evoked predictable outrage from the liberal media, a product of their ignorance and malice. Rather than address the usual calumnies against the Catholic Church hurled by the historically ill-informed, I will focus on a particular accusation regarding the Good Friday prayer for the Jews in the traditional Latin Rite.

It is a telling measure of the irrational hatred against traditional Catholicism that an objection should be raised against a prayer that is said only once a year in a language that few understand. Moreover the prayer is said for the Jews, not against them, unlike the litany of curses still uttered in some orthodox Jewish liturgies. The real crime, of course, is that it is a prayer for their conversion to Christianity, a sentiment that is intolerable to those who do not wish to see the Church grow at the expense of others. Failing to see how ludicrous it is to expect the Church to renounce evangelism and adopt a platform of religious indifferentism, liberals are astonishingly narrow-minded in their expectation that everyone else should share their ideological assumptions, or be banished to the dustbin of history. The more independent thinkers have learned not to expect intellectual coherence in mainstream liberalism, so let us proceed to hard facts rather than ideology.

A more concrete accusation against the Good Friday prayer is that it slanders the Jews as “perfidious,” which in English means “treacherous” or “lying”. This misunderstanding is based on an inadequate understanding of medieval Latin. In classical Latin, perfidus did have a meaning similar to its present English analogue, derived as it was from the phrase per fidem decipere, “to deceive through trust.” However, by late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, perfides and perfidia simply meant the opposite of fides and fidelis. (K.P. Harrington, Mediaeval Latin (1925), p. 181) Thus perfides in medieval Latin is best translated as “faithless” or “unbelieving”, meaning lacking the Christian faith.

An example of such matter-of-fact usage can be seen in St. Bede the Venerable’s account of the life and martyrdom of St. Alban, with my translation:

Qui videlicet Albanus paganus adhuc, cum perfidorum principum mandata adversum Christianos, saevirent, clericum quendam persecutores fugientem hospitio recepit.

Alban, who was clearly still a pagan, with mandates of the unbelieving rulers taking violent action against Christians, received a certain cleric fleeing persecutors into his hospitality.

Here the phrase perfidorum principum mandata is best translated “mandates of the unbelieving rulers,” and the context shows there is no implication that the rulers were treacherous or dishonest. Perfidus simply refers to the state of unbelief with respect to the Christian faith. Such usage is in fact typical of medieval Latin writers.

With this understanding, we see that the Church prayed for the perfidus Iudaeus as part of the Good Friday prayer for all the various groups of non-believers: first the heretics and schismatics, then the unbelieving Jews, then the pagans. It is necessary to specify the unbelieving Jews, since these prayers do not apply to those Jews who have already converted to Christianity. The Church does not accept the position of some Jews that those who convert to Christianity are somehow less authentically Jewish or not Jewish at all. On the contrary, the Church sees Christianity as the perfection and fulfillment of Judaism.

Of course, it is unacceptable to liberals for Christians to portray the New Covenant as supplanting the Old, or to suggest that the Jews lack the light which is Christ, as the Good Friday prayer states. As no one denies that the non-Christian Jews do not believe in Christ, the only possible source of objection to the Good Friday prayer, once clarified linguistically, is its clear implication that Jesus is the light of the whole world, not only for Christians, but for Jews and pagans. It is that sentiment that is the essence of the Good Friday prayer, and what makes the adversaries of Christianity seethe with rage, for they would rather be let alone and have Christianity renounce its historic claims. More absurdly, with respect to liberal notions of tolerance, they expect Christians to renounce such claims even when praying amongst themselves.