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Today in Alternate History
This
Day in Alternate History Blog
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Come Be My Light
by Steve Payne
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.
Steve Payne
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.

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