Years ago I would have listened to this fascinating interview between John Batchelor and former Missionary of Charity Collette Livermore and thought she was obviously "proud" and under the influence of dark forces. (Download Hour 3 from the web page, and begin the podcast at 19:25 for the interview.)
Now, after years of my own struggles with the human dimensions of Catholicism in particular cultural forms, I see Livermore on a journey of painful inquiry much like my own, over what is proper for Roman Catholicism.
Livermore made a commitment as a young girl to help the poor by joining Mother Theresa's Missionaries of Charity in India. But she could not stay on, due to the pain the order's superiors inflicted upon her.
As she recounts in the above radio interview, and in greater detail in her new book, Hope Endures, her efforts to help the poor were attacked for bureaucratic reasons, and for authoritarian ones. Her motives were portrayed constantly as being more prideful than charitable.
No one can know for sure. Not even her superiors, by the way.
This woman, now a secular doctor, strikes me as sincere and of good will. She was clearly stunned by her superiors' constant guessing at and demeaning her motives. One gets the sense that in this environment, authority became a license to abuse.
It's not an uncommon story. Rarely do the humans who inhabit saints' religious orders share the "charism" of the founder. The question Livermore raises however, is did these abusive individuals do their acts of uncharity with the approval of Mother Theresa? Because Mother Theresa felt such humiliation was a refuge from the greater problem of doubt?
Better to live in uncertainty about your own worth, than God's worth in your life?
The question is briefly touched upon in the interview. But I sense from it that there is no definitive answer, only speculation.
I'll leave it to the Church to decide how this story affects Mother Theresa's case for sainthood. From my perspective however, the ability to live with doubt, questioning, even being scandalized by evil in the world and the inscrutable nature of the First Cause's universe is all part of the essential struggle of faith and reason. One almost gets used to it as the background noise of a life in pursuit of God.
I can't speak for the ultimate conclusions of Livermore's book, which I will have to read. But, this interview angers me, because I care about religion, and don't like the idea that unjustified, unverifiable, and ultimately codependent acts of humiliation would be used as an answer to doubt.
Just to clarify, but my use of "unverifiable" at the close of this piece is meant to indicate that these superiors are guessing without evidence at someone's motivations. Question: Does religious authority create moral and spiritual risk because one is empowered and obligated to guess, in a purely codependent manner, at others' motivations?
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