Reaction mixed to priest's advice not to be like Mother Teresa*

By GSM News Staff

Washington, D.C., February 13, 2019 - Reaction was mixed in response the advice of Jesuit Father James Martin, who last week published a spiritual reflection at America Magazine advising readers that "to be a saint, just be who you are."

Father Martin pointed to the example of St. Teresa of Calcutta, noting that few people are called to work with the poorest of the poor in the slums. "You're not supposed to be Mother Teresa," he wrote. "As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, 'For me, to be a saint means to be myself.' So maybe it's time to stop trying to be someone else. Stop looking at someone else's roadmap to holiness."

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Many contacted by GSM News were quick to praise the prominent Jesuit priest's advice to "be who you are," including Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who executed more than a million of his own citizens; Mao Zdung, whose "Great Leap Forward" killed tens of millions of Chinese; and Pol Pot, whose Khmer Rouge regime murdered nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population.

"He spoke right to my heart," said Adolf Hitler, German Führer from 1934 until his suicide at the conclusion of the Second World War. 

Others, however, found Father Martin's words troubling, most prominently the apostle Paul, who wrote rebuttals of Father Martin's advice in letters to the Christian communities he had founded in Galatia and Corinth. 

"I have been crucified with Christ," St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, who had turned from the Gospel to be themselves. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."

St. Paul similarly advised the Corinthians to keep trying to be someone else, going so far as to hold himself up as their roadmap to holiness. "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ," he wrote.

The reaction from Pope Francis was also swift. In his 2016 homily at the canonization Mass for Mother Teresa he flatly contradicted Father Martin, telling the faithful to take the newly minted saint as their model: "Today, I pass on this emblematic figure of womanhood and of consecrated life to the whole world of volunteers."

"May she be your model of holiness!" the Holy Father concluded.

Being his typical self and not engaging his critics, Father Martin could not be reached for comment.


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* Because right now, humor is the only thing that makes sense.