Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta's slums, the spirit leaves her.
"Where is my faith?" she writes. "Even deep down ... there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. ... If there be God — please forgive me."
Eight years later, she's still looking for the belief she's lost.
"Such deep longing for God," she writes. "... repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal."
As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she says, is a mask.
"What do I labor for?" she asks. "If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true."
"These are letters that were kept in the archbishop's house," says the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk.
The letters were gathered by Rev. Kolodiejchuk, the priest who's making the case to the Vatican for Mother Teresa's proposed sainthood. He says her obvious spiritual torment actually helps her cause.
"Now we have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and for me this seems to be the most heroic," says Rev. Kolodiejchuk.
According to her letters, Mother Teresa died with her doubts. She had even stopped praying, she once said.
The church decided to keep her letters, even though one of her dying wishes was that they be destroyed. Perhaps now we know why.
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