On the Catholic youth revival and Mother Teresa

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 05, 2025

Today, September 5th, is the feast day of Mother Teresa. It is also happens to be the day in which the Wall Street Journal’s weekly “Houses of Worship” column asks “Has Britain Stopped Secularizing?” Says the subtitle, “Across the country, a wealth of evidence tells of a modest but real Christian revival.”

The column tells what has become a familiar story for those following recent trends in religion. Secularism may have peaked. There is an uptick in church attendance. Young people, in particular, are attracted to the stronger stuff. Things like “‘the more traditional strands’ of Catholicism.” They want their religion straight, without a chaser of modernism to wash it down.

That’s good to hear. I’ve often lamented that today’s young Catholics don’t have living figures of towering Catholic heroism and sanctity, like Pope St. John Paul II and Mother Teresa, in the news to remind them that Catholicism is real. In my case, I needed them.

My teenage Catholic 1980s was the 10:30 Mass in the auditorium of our local parish, sitting in those fold-out chairs with the basketball hoops above us, while the folk group jammed to the same two or three Dan Schutte songs every Sunday (“Sing a New Song,” “Though the Mountains May Fall”) and the priest preaching against Miami Vice and RoboCop. I’m sorry but it was pretty cheesy.

Mother Teresa and John Paul II were the flip side of that. I would even say they were the antidote.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of Mother Teresa and John Paul II to a Catholic my age who felt an attachment to his Catholic identity. One, albeit imperfect, analogy I can think of is what seeing the actress Nichelle Nichols playing Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek meant to young African-American women in the 1960s. I felt represented. Seeing Mother Teresa and John Paul II made me proud of who I am, as a Catholic, and it gave me something to shoot for.

But of course, it was much more than that. Having these two living examples made me believe Catholicism was everything it claimed to be, despite any evidence to the contrary on the local level. Catholicism wasn’t just felt tip banners and lousy preaching and the same two or three terrible folk songs over and over again.

Catholicism was real. It could topple the powerful. It could love the lowly. The Three Persons in one God, Jesus Christ true God and true Man, His Immaculate Mother, all of it was true.

And following this truth to the utmost can produce a Mother Teresa, whom even the jaded world of the late 20th century knew to be a living saint. That was Mother Teresa’s greatest gift to the world in which I lived. She showed us that Christian sanctity is real.

Much has been made of the book by her spiritual director, who revealed that Mother Teresa felt an absence of God for 50 years. Those who think this revelation exposes Catholic sanctity as false completely miss the truly shocking thing about it. If anything, it reveals Mother Teresa as an even greater saint than we knew in her lifetime, perhaps one of the greatest in the 2,000 years of Christianity.

Those familiar with the topic know that it is common for mystics to have an experience of union with Christ followed by a period of “spiritual dryness,” a “dark night of the soul” that is actually from God and to their ultimate benefit.

That Mother Teresa experienced this for 50 years and still was the person she was, still accomplished the things she did, without any special consolations from Heaven shows a sanctity that is off the charts. Her sanctity likely exceeds that of other famous saints who experienced the same thing but for much shorter periods of time.

Thank you Holy Church, for canonizing this holy woman. Thank you Mother Teresa, for showing the world of my lifetime that sanctity is real. Saint Teresa of Kolkata, pray for us—and for this new generation finding their way home to the Catholic Church.