Revelations from Mother Teresa's Prayer Life

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - September 7, 2007

The recent frenzy about the significance of Blessed Mother Teresa's dark night of the soul revealed far more than the inner workings of her interior life. It also revealed a profound bias in the secular media and exposed a serious internal issue for the Church.

The mania began when Time magazine published a cover story review of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, a newly released book of forty letters Teresa of Calcutta wrote to her spiritual directors over the last fifty years of her life. The letters detail that for almost the entire time Mother Teresa carried out her divine mission of charity among the world's most abandoned, she herself had suffered what seemed to be a terrifying, total abandonment by the Lord in prayer.

This experience, called by the 16th century great teacher of prayer St. John of the Cross the "dark night of the soul," is part of the advanced, but standard, spiritual itinerary on which God has led many of the great saints, famous and hidden. That Mother Teresa herself was chosen by God to undergo this experience for five decades is a deep confirmation, rather than a contradiction, of her profound sanctity. Mother Teresa herself recognized this, which is why in 1952 she asked her spiritual director to destroy the letters. If they were ever published, she feared, "people would think more of me" rather than less, and that was too much for her humility to allow.

But thinking "more" of her was not the way those in the mainstream media framed the story. Beginning with Time's salaciously provocative title, "The Secret Life of Mother Teresa," other media outlets continued the tabloid treatment. Her letters were portrayed as evidence that she was not the saint we thought. Rather than seeking out those who could explain the stages of prayer on which God takes the saints, reporters and television producers opted for self-promoting atheists who accused her first of being a con-artist and then described her as an example not of faith and persevering prayer but of the futility of both.

Father Andrew Greeley, in an August 29 column in the Chicago Sun-Times, adroitly described the principal cause of the sensationalized and false coverage. The secular media's "paradigm for all things Catholic," he wrote, is "scandal" and therefore every story of interest on the Church must begin with that lead in mind. Mainstream news outlets are not interested in a story that begins, "Catholic experts on sanctity said today that the revelation of the secret letters of Mother Teresa of Calcutta were simply one more proof that she indeed was a saint and a very great saint at that." No, Greeley pointed out, it is a "much better 'grabber' to summon up an atheist to proclaim that the soon-to-be-saint was a hypocrite."

The media coverage, however, also revealed a deeper issue for the Church than the jaundiced lens through which she is popularly portrayed: many practicing Catholics were so unaware of traditional spiritual theology that their faith was shaken by the media's gross mischaracterizations of the meaning of Mother Teresa's dark night.

Pope John Paul II repeatedly stressed that Catholic parishes are meant to be "genuine schools of prayer," where the "art" of prayer is taught and learned. In his pastoral plan for the third Christian millennium (Novo Millennio Ineunte), he wrote, "It is essential that education in prayer should become in some way a key point of all pastoral planning." But in many parishes, that education has simply not been the "key point" of parish life.

Just as the gullibility of so many Catholics to the fabrications of The Da Vinci Code demonstrated deep deficiencies in the catechesis and apologetic training of Church faithful, so the number of Catholics who thought that Mother Teresa's dark night vitiated rather than confirmed her sanctity manifests just how much the Church needs to do in educating the faithful about prayer. Not every Catholic will journey through all seven rooms of the "interior castle" that St. Teresa of Avila describes, but Catholics minimally should know about them.

John Paul II noted that the ubiquitous demand for spirituality in spite of widespread secularization is a "sign of the times" to which the Church must respond. He specifically called on priests to be "masters of prayer" who convey to their parishioners how "prayer can progress, as a genuine dialogue of love, to the point of rendering the person wholly possessed by the divine Beloved." This journey takes one through "painful purifications (like the dark night) … to the ineffable joy experienced by the mystics as 'nuptial union.'"

This education in prayer is meant not just for those in religious life, but for all the faithful. "It would be wrong," John Paul II stressed, "to think that ordinary Christians can be content with a shallow prayer life that is unable to fill their whole life. Especially in the face of the many trials to which today's world subjects faith, they would not only be mediocre Christians, but 'Christians at risk.' They would run the insidious risk of seeing their faith progressively undermined and would perhaps end up succumbing to the allure of 'substitutes,' accepting alternative religious proposals and even indulging in far-fetched superstitions."

As Bishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, there are no plateaus in the spiritual life; we are either going uphill or we are sliding down hill. If parishes are not schools that help the faithful progress in the art of prayer, then the risk is not just that the faithful will be able neither to identify nor experience the studia of spiritual progress; the danger is also that they may lose their faith altogether.

Mother Teresa has long been viewed as a model of love for Christ in the "distressing disguise of the poor." The publication of her letters will help her to become, too, an example of love for Christ in the sometimes "distressing disguise" of the Eucharist in prayer. As we mark the tenth anniversary of her birth into eternal life, we ask her to intercede for the faithful of the diocese so that we may follow her in both.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.