Letters reveal Mother Teresas 40-year crisis of faith

A new set of Mother Teresas letters show that she was going through a crisis of faith for the last 40 years of her life.

London, Aug 24 : A new set of Mother Teresa's letters show that she was going through a crisis of faith for the last 40 years of her life.

The letters are published for the first time in a new book, 'Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light'.

The Rev Brian Kolodiejchuk, a close friend of Mother Teresa's, has edited the book.

A 1979 letter to the Rev Michael Van Der Peet, a spiritual confidant, written just a few weeks before she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her charitable work, shows that she felt increasingly alone, and in a state of spiritual pain.

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak," the Telegraph quotes her, as writing in the letter.

In another letter she writes: "The smile is a mask or a cloak that covers everything. I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God, a tender personal love. If you were there you would have said, 'What hypocrisy'."

Rev Kolodiejchuk gathered the letters as part of the process to make Mother Teresa a saint.

The letters, Rev Kolodiejchuk insists, are important as they show that she was able to continue her work even through her torment, that started from around 1949, roughly the time when she started taking care of the poor and dying in Calcutta.

This he says is a sign of her spiritual heroism.

Mother Teresa has been beatified, and is awaiting canonisation.

ANI