An important dialogue between a believer and a non-believer has developed in the past two years in the conversation between Pope Benedict XVI and Marcello Pera, a member of the Italian Senate and a distinguished philosopher of science.

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The current press conniption over Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta amounts to a tempest in a teapot, although one that illustrates the media's ignorance about the spiritual lives of saints far more than it does the life and struggles of Mother Teresa.

That the diminutive Albanian nun and Nobel Peace Prize winner had, for decades, experienced a sense of living in a spiritual desert had been well known to those paying attention, ever since excerpts from the "positio," the critical biography prepared on behalf of her beatification cause, were published before her beatification by Pope John Paul II in October 2003; those interested may wish to consult Carol Zaleski's insightful and sensitive article, "Mother Teresa's Dark Night," in the May 2003 issue of First Things. So there is, in fact, no news here (except, perhaps, the "news" that religion reporters an editors should put www.firstthings.com into their computers).

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