Continuing with Mother Teresa

Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the Papal Household, reprinted by Sandro Magister: 

Today’s world has hatched a new category of people: atheists in good faith, those who experience the silence of God as a painful burden, who do not believe in God and yet do not boast of this, experiencing instead existential anguish and an absolute lack of meaning; they too, in their own way, live in a dark night of the soul. In his novel “The Plague,” Albert Camus calls them “saints without God.” The mystics exists above all for them; they are their companions on the road and at table. Like Jesus, they “have sat at table with sinners and have eaten with them” (cf. Luke 15:2). This explains the passion with which certain atheists, once they have converted, have thrown themselves into the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Leon Bloy, the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, and many others plunged into the writings of Angela da Foligno; T.S. Eliot, into those of Julian of Norwich. Here they found the same landscape that they had left behind, but this time illuminated by the sun. Few know that the author of “Waiting for Godot,” Samuel Beckett, read Saint John of the Cross in his free time.The word “atheist” can have an active or a passive meaning. It can indicate someone who rejects God, but also someone who is rejected by God – or at least feels himself to be. The first case is one of culpable atheism (when it is not in good faith), while the second is an atheism of suffering or expiation. In the latter sense, we can say that the mystics, in the night of the soul, are a-theists – without God – and that on the cross Jesus, too, was an a-theist, one without God.

Mother Teresa wrote words that no one would have expected from her: “They say that the eternal pain that souls suffer in Hell is the loss of God… In my soul, I experience precisely this terribly pain of damnation, of a God who does not want me, of a God who is not God, of a God who in reality does not exist. Jesus, I beg you to forgive my blasphemy.” But one realizes that her a-theism was of a different character, marked by solidarity and expiation: “In this world that is so far from God, that has turned its back on the light of Jesus, I want to help the people by taking on some of their suffering.” The clearest indicator that this atheism is of a completely different nature is the inexpressible suffering that it provokes in the mystics. Ordinary atheists do not go through this kind of agony because of their atheism!

The mystics have come within a step of the world where people live without God; they have experienced that dizzying plunge. Mother Teresa again writes to her spiritual father: “I was on the verge of saying ‘No’… I feel like one of these days something inside me will have to snap.” “Pray for me, that I do not reject God in this hour. I do not want this, but I am afraid I could do it.”

For this reason, the mystics are the ideal evangelizers in the postmodern world, where people live “etsi Deus non daretur,” as if God did not exist. They remind the honest atheists that they are not “far from the kingdom of God,” that in just one leap they could be on the side of the mystics, passing from nothing to everything.

Karl Rahner was right when he said, “In the future, Christianity will be mystical, or it will not exist at all.” Padre Pio and Mother Teresa are the response to this sign of the times. We must not underestimate the saints, reducing them to channels of grace, or merely good examples.

While you’re over there at Chiesa, check out Magister’s column from last week, reprinting an article from Avennire on Christians in the UAE:

It is Sunday, but in a Muslim country like the United Arab Emirates this is just another day. And yet, late in the afternoon iat n the Catholic church of Saint Joseph in Abu Dhabi, I witness an extraordinary coming and going of faithful belonging to different ethnic groups, who come here to participate in the Mass celebrated in their own native language. There are Indians – mostly from Kerala or Tamil Nadu – Filipinos, Lebanese, Iraqis, or Christians from other Middle Eastern countries, and also Europeans and Americans.

On Friday, the weekly holiday in Muslim countries, the faithful stream through in even greater numbers, so much so that the church cannot hold them all. Many must follow the celebration from outside, in the front churchyard, where gigantic screens are set up on special feasts like Christmas or Easter so that everyone can participate. Nonetheless, Paul Hinder, bishop of the apostolic vicariate of Arabia, takes care to clarify that those who come to the parish regularly are only a small proportion, 15-18 percent, of the Catholic population in the capital and the surrounding area.

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The Christians present in the United Arab Emirates represent about 35 percent of the population, for a total of more than a million faithful, a majority of them Catholic.

They are all immigrant workers, and many of them, because they live on the outskirts and don’t have easy transportation access to the city, cannot regularly attend the official places of worship. This is the situation of the thousands of Indians who work on the construction sites in Dubai and are housed in the largest village-dormitory in Asia. According to unofficial estimates, this houses a population of about thirty thousand workers. Or there are the immigrants who work in the oil industry, who are cut off in isolated desert villages.

Another case is that of the Filipina housemaids who, because they don’t have enough free time or enough money for transportation, remain bound to the places where they work. In consequence, small prayer groups – which are organized according to language and place of origin and meet in private settings like apartments, dormitories, and storage sheds – have become a very important and widespread form of religious expression for the Catholic communities. These are necessary moments of encounter, but they are also risky because of the rules imposed by the local authorities, who grant freedom of worship only in officially recognized places like the territory’s parishes. In this context, the Charismatic groups from India or the Philippines take on an important role in spearheading initiatives in support of immigrants living in the most difficult conditions. These are often not limited to religious initiatives, but also include services of practical assistance, as in the case of the Legion of Mary mentioned above.