Why is it even newsworthy that Mother Teresa was racked with doubt about the existence—or presence—of God? This is the normal condition for a Christian. Only someone who doesn’t understand Christianity, or whose aim is to undermine it, could think such doubt scandalous. John Hick has argued that God created an ambiguous world on purpose: to make human freedom (and therefore responsibility) possible:

[W]hat freedom could finite beings have in an immediate consciousness of the presence of the one who has created them, who knows them through and through, who is limitlessly powerful as well as limitlessly loving and good, and who claims their total obedience? In order to be a person, exercising some measure of genuine freedom, the creature must be brought into existence, not in the immediate divine presence, but at a “distance” from God. This “distance” cannot of course be spatial; for God is omnipresent. It must be an epistemic distance, a distance in the cognitive dimension. And the Irenaean hypothesis is that this “distance” consists, in the case of humans, in their existence within and as part of a world which functions as an autonomous system and from within which God is not overwhelmingly evident. It is a world, in Bonhoeffer’s phrase, etsi deus non daretur, as if there were no God. Or rather, it is religiously ambiguous, capable both of being seen as a purely natural phenomenon and of being seen as God’s creation and experienced as mediating God’s presence. In such a world one can exist as a person over against the Creator. One has space to exist as a finite being, a space created by the epistemic distance from God and protected by one’s basic cognitive freedom, one’s freedom to open or close oneself to the dawning awareness of God which is experienced naturally by a religious animal. This Irenaean picture corresponds, I suggest, to our actual human situation. Emerging within the evolutionary process as part of the continuum of animal life, in a universe which functions in accordance with its own laws and whose workings can be investigated and described without reference to a creator, the human being has a genuine, even awesome, freedom in relation to one’s Maker. The human being is free to acknowledge and worship God; and is free—particularly since the emergence of human individuality and the beginnings of critical consciousness during the first millennium B.C.—to doubt the reality of God. (John Hick, “Soul-Making Theodicy,” in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, 3d ed., ed. Michael Peterson et al. [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 341-53, at 344-5 [essay first published in 1981])

What would truly be scandalous, from a Christian point of view, is Mother Teresa’s not having doubts.