Pope’s Albania visit: Vatican silence on Mother Teresa regretted

By C.M. Paul 

Guwahati: In less than 20 days, Pope Francis is scheduled to make his historic visit to Albania, the country Mother Teresa of Calcutta called her native place. However, the Vatican’s silence on the celebrity daughter of the proud nation has irked Mother Teresa’s fellow country man and internationally renowned academic.

In mid-June, Albanian-born Gëzim Alpion, considered “the most authoritative English-language author” on Mother Teresa, single handedly spearheaded an online campaign requesting the Vatican to speed up Mother Teresa’s canonization process.

The professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham, UK, with a doctorate from Durham University in 1997, claims: “One of the reasons why Mother Teresa’s cause for canonization has stalled is due to the revelations about her deep distress in experiencing the ‘dark night of the soul’; this often forced her to doubt both God’s existence and the nature of her decision to serve the poorest of the poor.”

The revelations were made public initially in 2000 and 2001 in two articles by Albert Huart and Joseph Neuner respectively.

The full scale of Mother Teresa’s spiritual agony, however, was revealed in a collection of her private writings entitled “Come Be My Light.” The controversial book was edited by Fr Brian Kolodiejchuk, who insists that the revered nun “lived a trial of faith, not a crisis of faith,” and that she overcame it showing that the love “is in the will and not in feelings.”

The 2007 book, whose title “Come Be My Light” comes from the words Jesus apparently spoke to Mother Teresa in 1946, is a collection of letters in which the nun wrote about various aspects of her life, some revealing that she suffered spiritual darkness for decades. The book is about a trial of faith that Mother endured for 50 years, which is very different from a crisis of faith.

This is not something new among saints. The phenomenon of “the dark night of the soul” is well known in spiritual theology, and is attributed to St John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish poet and Catholic mystic. John of the Cross is the author of the renowned poem “Dark Night of the Soul” (La noche oscura del alma), and of a treatise he wrote later, commenting on the poem.

Different from Fr Kolodiejchuk, after seven years of studying intensively Mother Teresa’s spiritual aridity, Professor Alpion insists that, unlike other medieval and modern saints such as John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and Thérèse of Lisieux, Mother Teresa suffered from the dark night of the soul until the end of her life.

“Mother Teresa’s exemplary devotion to the ‘human debris,’ in spite of the spiritual torment she had to put up with throughout her missionary life,” Alpion is keen to stress, “is a unique miraculous feat in itself.”

Alpion welcomes Pope Francis’ upcoming visit to Albania but underscores its significance beyond his native country. In Alpion’s words, “The Pope’s visit to Tirana on September 21 is an important event for Albania and the Balkans.”

He endorses “the Pope’s observation that Albania presents a unique case in terms of interfaith harmony.” All the same, according to Alpion, some Vatican advisers “apparently need a refresher course in history.”

Alpion explains that, “the Pope is not visiting a ‘Muslim’, country, as the papal visit has been advertised in some cases; Albania does not have an official religion.”

He further adds, Albania is not one of the nations “in the former Yugoslavia,” as the Pope said in an interview while returning from South Korea.

Those who put together the Pope’s announcement on June 16 that he will visit a country that “has suffered for so long as a consequence of the ideologies of the past,” Alpion adds, seem to have taken the words verbatim from the announcement of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Albania on April 25, 1993.

Alpion reminds the Vatican functionaries that “the mistakes and crimes committed by Albanian communists cannot and should not be forgotten, but the Church apparently needs to take a hint from Mother Teresa who always preached forgiveness.”

Alpion further points out: “The greatest evil Albania is facing at the moment is corruption, and personalities like the Pope should follow the example Mother Teresa who, while keeping company of the rich and the powerful, was not reticent when it came to denouncing the evils of her time. We may not agree all the time with what she considered ‘evil’ – I don’t – but world leaders knew she would always speak her mind.”

In an exclusive interview to mattersindia.com, Alpion claims: “Some controversial Albanian politicians over the last three decades have used every opportunity and invented every excuse to rush to the Vatican for audiences and photos with Pope John Paul II, Benedict XVI and now Pope Francis. If only corruption and nepotism were exonerated by meeting a pontiff!”

Alpion would have preferred that “the Vatican had referred in the announcement about the Pope’s visit to Albania to this country’s ancient Christian heritage. Christ’s message to Rome passed first through Illyria, as the land populated by Albanians’ ancestors was previously known. In this sense, the current pontiff is not going to a terra incognita but will have an opportunity to walk in the footsteps of St Paul.”

Equally important, according to Alpion, is the fact that “at least 4 Popes are of Albanian origin: St Eleutherius (c. 175-189), St Caius (283-296), John IV (640-642), and Clement XI (1700-1721).

For this and other reasons, it is hardly surprising that the Albanians, one of the most ancient nations in Europe, are proud of Mother Teresa, who was considered a saint when she was alive but has yet to be formally recognised as such by the Holy See.”

Alpion, who does not follow any religion and describes himself as a ‘spiritual-rationalist,’ states that “this is a good opportunity for the Vatican to recognize that the Albanians have never been on the frontiers/outskirts of Christianity but at its very heart from the first.”

He also hopes that “the Pope will finally announce in Tirana the resumption of the cause for the canonization of Mother Teresa which was stalled after the death of her great friend and colleague Pope John Paul II who was fully aware of the inestimable contribution she rendered to the Church and his own papacy.”

The Change.org petition, which Alpion started mid-June, crossed 1,500 signatures July end and is supported by bishops, celebrities, film stars, priests, nuns and laity from 45 countries.

Professor Alpion hopes “the Pope’s visit to Tirana will encourage more admirers of Mother Teresa in Albania and across the world to sign the petition which asks the Vatican to complete her canonization”.

Dr Alpion hit international headlines in 2004 while he was still researching his controversial book “Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity?” which was published by Routledge in London and New York in 2006, Routledge India in New Delhi in 2008, and Salerno Editrice in Rome in 2008.

His work in progress on Mother Teresa, which will be published in 2015, is expected to throw unprecedented light on Mother Teresa’s early years, a period which still remains largely unexplored in the vast Mother Teresa scholarship.

mattersindia.com