Actually, more important than Mother Teresa’s spiritual struggle is her constant practice of virtue. The shrill voices of militant atheism – including contributors to this website, both as columnists and as bloggers – have never understood faith and probably never will. They build their intellectual edifice on the canard that atheism is the product of rational thought and religion of mindless superstition. However, in the modern United States, virtually every public institution promotes separation of church and state as well as secularism over religion. That’s fine in my book because it proves that believing in God is the harder thing to do today.

But why believe in God, especially if that entails belonging to a religion? As the excerpts show, Mother Teresa was all too aware of the human failings of priests and bishops in the Catholic Church. Yet she continued to work within religion despite her doubts of God’s presence and the imperfections of the institution. For some, that makes her a fool: for actual history, that makes her a saint. She spent most of her life providing love to people facing suffering and death. Working through religion, she brought others to do the same without personal reward. As Jesus said, “By their fruits you will know them.”

Consider in contrast, the commitments of Mother Teresa’s major detractors. They make much money writing snide comments in glossy page magazines, ridiculing a person who spends their life alleviating suffering. Their argument pretends to be sophisticated but rests on a single premise: If religion is not perfect, it is evil. That is silly, since religion is built upon a belief that nothing is fully perfect in this world.

The alternative proposed by some self-satisfied atheists is to live by yourself in a world where love is unimportant because it is not based on a rational premise that I get some advantage for myself. Where every institution that is imperfect (all of them) falls beneath the atheist.

When I am sick and dying, as inevitably I will be one day, I don’t care about the politics of the people in the room. I prefer to have someone like Mother Teresa nearby rather than a solipsistic spoil-sport, spouting the silly cant of militant atheism.