Mother Teresa, Prophetess

Posts about Mother Teresa have been flourishing lately, both in praise and in detraction. I fall into the former of those categories, obviously. Fr. Benedict Groeschel is one who knew her about as well as anyone besides her spiritual directors, as she would often stay with his little community when she would visit New York. He defends her against her detractors in a recent post at First Things. I found this paragraph near the end to be particularly enlightening:

In the midst of all the ill-advised and stupid analyses done of Mother Teresa by her critics, who know little or nothing about the spiritual life, my own conviction, after watching her carefully for three decades, was that Mother Teresa was not only a saint but also a prophetess, pointing the Church in a new and right direction in the difficult and puzzling age that dawns on us. It seems to me that she was like Catherine of Siena, who prepared the Church for the Renaissance, and Teresa of Avila, who pulled the Church out of the doldrums as the turbulence of the Reformation period broke over it. Should we be surprised that a prophetess receives such bad treatment? By no means. There are many examples in Sacred Scripture of exactly the same thing. In fact, Mother Teresa, who sought to emulate Jesus in so many ways, now does it by encountering vicious calumny and detraction.