The Turning: The Sisters Who Left · iHeartPodcasts and Rococo Punch

S1: Ep 8 - Saint of Darkness

July 6, 2021·46 min·3 clips

Mother Teresa's private letters reveal she wrote 'the place of God in my soul is blank — he does not want me' for nearly 50 years while smiling publicly.

Mary Johnson goes to sleep in Rome, inside the MC Convent in San Gregorio. One fall evening in 1995 turns into a strange dream: a potter at a wheel, humming as she shapes clay into small figures. She breathes life into them until they look like people. Then the floor opens. Mary sees the world below while each figure is lifted and placed somewhere in it. The dream has a hushed, uncanny feeling, all breath, hands, and placement. Then the story jumps ahead. Mother Teresa dies in 1997, and Father Brian Kolodziejczyk begins the formal work around sainthood. As postulator, he gathers documents for the beatification and canonization cause, the Catholic path toward official recognition as a saint. He is also a priest in the Missionaries of Charity and superior general of the fathers' congregation. His CEO comparison makes the church structure easier to grasp, briefly, before the archive work takes over. In the Archbishop's house in Calcutta, he finds letters connected to Mother Teresa that had been hidden from public. Procedure gives way to something more private: guarded papers, interior struggle, and the gap between public holiness and what a person leaves behind.

As heard by us

A careful look at sainthood, secrecy, and the strain beneath reverence.

The episode treats a convent in Rome, a dream of figurines coming alive, and the hidden letters behind Mother Teresa's sainthood as one uneasy whole.

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Why you'd press play

Mother Teresa's hidden letters meet Mary Johnson's vivid dream.

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