He'll also be recognising holiness in a woman who felt so abandoned by God that she was unable to pray and was convinced, despite her ever-present smile, that she was experiencing the "tortures of hell."
For nearly 50 years, Mother Teresa endured what the church calls a "dark night of the soul" a period of spiritual doubt, despair and loneliness that many of the great mystics experienced, her namesake St. Therese of Lisieux included. In Mother Teresa's case, the dark night lasted most of her adult life, an almost unheard of trial.
For the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who published the letters and spearheaded Mother Teresa's saint- making campaign, the revelations were further confirmation of Mother Teresa's heroic saintliness. He said that by canonizing her, Francis is recognising that Mother Teresa not only shared the material poverty of the poor but the spiritual poverty of those who feel "unloved, unwanted, uncared for."
Also Read
Tens of thousands of people are expected for the canonization ceremony Sunday for the tiny, stooped nun who was fast-tracked for sainthood just a year after she died in 1997.
St. John Paul II, who was Mother Teresa's greatest champion, beatified her before a crowd of 300,000 in St. Peter's Square in 2003.
(Reopens FGN 14)
"That existential periphery which is suffering and being marginalized, he wants to bring that to the attention of the world," she said in a telephone interview. Mother Teresa "is so real. She's not remote. She's not a perfect, perfect saint."
That said, her blind faith in enduring the "darkness," as she called it, and persevering through it seems almost superhuman to outsiders.
"There is so much contradiction in my soul. Such deep longing for God, so deep that it is painful, a suffering continual, and yet not wanted by God, repulsed, empty, no faith, no love no zeal," she wrote. "Souls hold no attraction. Heaven means nothing, to me it looks like an empty place. The thought of it means nothing to me and yet this torturing longing for God."
"Pray for me please that I keep smiling at him in spite of everything."
In another letter, she acknowledged that her smile was "a big cloak which covers a multitude of pains."
Kolodiejchuk, though, says she was no hypocrite. He said that the smile was a genuine and heroic attempt to hide her private sufferings, even from God, and prevent others from suffering more.
"You can be joyful even if you're suffering because you are accepting, and you are working and acting with love that gives meaning to the suffering," he said in the courtyard of one of the Missionaries of Charity houses on the periphery of Rome.
Sister Prema, the current superior general of the Missionaries of Charity, recalled being in awe of the revelation and not being able even today to fully understand the depth of Mother Teresa's pain.
Kolodiejchuk, the postulator for the cause, says that in retrospect, Mother Teresa's "darkness" was actually a critical part of her vocation, kept hidden from the world that only saw a firm but loving mother superior who was the first in the chapel each morning and often worked herself to exhaustion at night tending to society's most unloved.