There are many things about Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta that
could be called heroic – her tireless service to the world's most
rejected and her courageous witness to millions of what it is to live
the Gospel, just to name a couple. But the priest charged with overseeing her path to sainthood said
that for him, one thing stands out above all the rest: her experience of
spiritual darkness and what she described as feeling totally abandoned
by God for the majority of her life. “The single most heroic thing is exactly her darkness. That pure
living, that pure, naked faith,” Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator
for Mother Teresa's canonization cause, told CNA in an interview. Fr.
Kolodiejchuk is a priest of the Missionaries of Charity Fathers, founded
by Mother Teresa in 1989. By undergoing the depth and duration of the desolation she
experienced and doing everything that she did for others in spite of it,
“that's really very heroic,” he said. Pope Francis recently approved the second and last miracle needed in
order to declare Mother Teresa a saint, and has set the date of her
canonization for Sept. 4, 2016 – the day before her feast day. Read more here.
Kurt Hilgefort, is a Catholic father of six who publishes his thoughts on his blog Shadows of Augustine . He responded to my seven question survey with the following answers. Kurt is the first layperson to respond to the seven question survey and I think that his experience is extremely relevant to me personally and I hope that you are inspired by his thoughts as well. If you would like to respond, please send an email to fellmananthony@gmail.com with your thoughts and I will be happy to publish them as well. 1. What is the biggest challenge to your faith that you have faced so far? The biggest challenge for me has been the whole dying to self thing. On an intellectual level, there are no barriers. It comes down to a matter of accepting the authority of the Church that Christ founded upon Peter. My challenge is not in the intellect, but rather in the will. The challenge for me has always been to continually seek conversion. I want to be transformed, but I want it to be over all ...
