February 2003

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Her name has become a synonym for holiness and faith, but it turns out that even Mother Teresa experienced dark nights of the soul. Between September 1946 and October 1947, she experienced visions of Jesus instructing her to found the Sisters of Charity, but she sank into spiritual depression when they stopped. "My smile is a great cloak that hides a multitude of pains," she wrote in 1958. "[People] think that my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing, and that my intimacy with God and union with His will fill my heart. If only they knew." Later she went into more detail: "The damned of hell suffer eternal punishment because they experiment with the loss of God. In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God, and that God does not exist." The writings appear in the newly published work, Il Segreto di Madre Teresa (Mother Teresa's Secret).

Stories referenced above include:

Newly released letters tell of Jesus calling Mother Teresa 'my little wife'—The Scotsman (Dec. 8, 2002)

Christianity Today's sister publication Christian History in 2000 wrote on why Mother Teresa "belongs to the whole world—not to Roman Catholics only, not to Christians only."

In 1997 a Christianity Today editorial by Randy Frame looked at "Why the World Listened."