Catholic Church

Warned by the Vatican

I came up with that as I cast about in my head for a good headline for this:

Church of England General Synod Backs Female Ordination

Members of its General Synod threw out compromise proposals on females in senior ranks.

All safeguards demanded by traditionalists were rejected.

But the Vatican warned the ruling would present a new obstacle to reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Church of England.

In a statement it said: “We learned with regret the news of the vote of the Church of England that opens the way to the introduction of legislation that would lead to the ordination of women bishops.”

Sky News correspondent Mike McCarthy said it was a historic and significant moment for the church.

“The real test now is how many people will leave (the Church). There are certainly going to be many wrestling with their consciences,” he said.

[…]

A total of 1,333 clergy have threatened to leave the Church of England if they are not given legal safeguards to set up a network of parishes that would remain under male leadership.

Mother Teresa: Behind Her Smile

Time is reporting about Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith:

Mother Teresa: Come Be My LightA new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”

That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness” and “torture” she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. “The smile,” she writes, is “a mask” or “a cloak that covers everything.”

The poor woman.

I wonder what she learned after she died.

By the way, her name at birth (in what is now Macedonia) was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. According to Wikipedia, “She took her first vows as a nun on 24 May 1931. At that time she chose the name Teresa after the patron saint of missionaries.”

Above all, love God!
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