Come Be My Light

Author says, Daniel 2: 31-40 introduced the theological term feet of clay to mean "a weakness or hidden flaw in the character of a greatly admired or respected person". What if the Pope had admitted to his own feet of clay by empathising with Mother Theresa's own spiritual crisis?

In 2009, the Catholic Church was astonished by news that Pope Benedict had written a foreword to a controversial biography of Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Mother Teresa was a 36-year-old convent teacher riding on a train in India on Sept. 10, 1946, when she said Christ spoke to her directly, telling her to become a missionary in the slums to help the poorest of the poor.

Come be My light,

is what she heard. Back then, she felt a deeply personal bond with Jesus, recounting conversations and visions. It was that loss that she mourned the rest of her life, although she never abandoned her work. Click

to watch Mother Theresa speaking in Calcutta.

How painful is this unknown pain - I have no Faith. If there be God- please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.

The ethnic Albanian nun, who dedicated her life to poor, sick and dying in India, died in 1997 aged 87. Mother Teresa was a globally beloved symbol of saintly devotion to the poor, who spent her last fifty years secretly struggling with doubts about her faith.

A research team led by Rev. Brian Kolodiechuk of the Missionaries of Charity Order had been examing secret letters for publication in a new biography, Mother Theresa: Come Be My Light. It appears that an unknown researcher had released the letters to the press after being shocked to read

How painful is thus unknown pain - I have no Faith. If there be God- please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.

What do I labour for? If there be no God, there can be no Soul, then Jesus you also are not true.’

In the biography's foreword, Pope Benedict wrote that even the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta

suffered from the silence of God' despite her immense charity and faith.

It is significant that the Pope mentioned Mother Teresa's torment about God's silence as not being unusual because there was some speculation that the letters could hurt the procedure to make her a saint.

All believers know about the silence of God,

wrote the Pope.

Even Mother Teresa, with all her charity and force of faith, suffered from the silence of God,

the Holy Pontif stated.

He said believers sometimes had to withstand the silence of God in order to understand the situation of people who do not believe. When the German-born pontiff visited the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in 2006, he publicly asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, mostly Jews, died there.

Author says, please note that we have repurposed content from an article of the same name in the Canadian National Post. The book Mother Theresa: Come Be My Light, is a collection of letters compiled by an advocate for her sainthood, published a decade after her death in 1997. The book depicts Mother Theresa as a mystic who experienced visions of Jesus speaking to her early in her ministry, only to lose that connection and long for it like an unrequited love for most of her last four decades. Because Mother Theresa asked for the private confessions to be destroyed, many have criticised the church. Yet in this post, we imagine a more empathetic response to these distressing revelations, from the Pope himself.

Editor of Today in Alternate History, a Daily Updating Blog of Important Events In History That Never Occurred Today.

Imagine what would be, if history had occurred a bit differently. Who says it didn't, somewhere? These fictional news items explore that possibility. Possibilities such as America becoming a Marxist superpower, aliens influencing human history in the 18th century and Teddy Roosevelt winning his 3rd term as president abound in this interesting fictional blog.