According to Roman Catholic tradition an applicant for sainthood needs two certified miracles. Mother Teresa has already cleared the first hurdle because Monica Besra claimed that by rubbing a medal of Mother Teresa on her cancerous tumour she was cured. The authorities were so convinced they granted Teresa the first step to sainthood that of being "beatified". "However several groups, including her doctors, have disputed that Mrs Besra was cured by a miracle, claiming instead that her tumour disappeared as a result of medical treatment at the local hospital. Mrs Besra has said that she visited hospital for treatment and taken prescribed medicines. In an interview with Time magazine in 2002, Mrs Besra's husband Seiku was among those to challenge the Vatican's claim. "It is much ado about nothing. My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle," he said. Ranjan Mustafi, a doctor at the local state-run Balurghat Hospital who treated Mrs Besra, said that the tumour had been caught at an early stage and had "responded to our treatment steadily." (Daily Telegraph, 6 September)
Tricky business this miracle business, especially when doctors and witnesses display such scepticism. " Oh, ye of little faith", as the good book would have it.
RD
The Glasgow & Edinburgh Branches Blog. Towards a better understanding of the world, in order to change it.
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From a new book about Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, based on the many letters she wrote to her spiritual counselors and confessors over an almost 50-year period
"What do I labor for?" she asked in one letter. "If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true."
"Jesus has a very special love for you ... [but] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ..."
In the letters she says her life is "hell" and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God.
She had even stopped praying, she writes in one of her letters.
A strange type of sait - one without much faith in God
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