Princess Diana was looking for love. Mother Teresa gave it

National Post, 31 August 2022

The Princess of Wales and St. Teresa of Calcutta died just five days apart, 25 years ago

Diana, Princess of Wales, and Mother Teresa died just days apart 25 years ago. The intervening quarter century has not been kind to the former’s memory; the latter is a canonized saint.

In late summer 1997 the fevered media frenzy fumbled to depict the two as sisters in humanitarian service, though it was an impossible stretch, even if Elton John was hymning Diana as the greatest English soul since Augustine left Rome for Canterbury.

She was not a great soul, but rather a small and superficial one, and now there are only a few threadbare bits left of her legacy. Already by the 20th anniversary Diana’s cult — like Sir Elton’s candle — had burned out.

Tina Brown, the grand dame of royal biographers, snuffed out the smouldering wick this year in her recent book, The Palace Papers, attributing Diana’s death to her recklessness in carrying on with a parade of dubious paramours.

Diana was no saint — and Charles followed a still more execrable way — but she became something of a patroness of her time. The young Spencer daughter experienced what was becoming widespread in her generation, namely being raised in a broken home, as it used to be called, though in her case the home was a historic stately one. She was looking for love and searching for stability when she fell for Charles, who had already found love elsewhere and sought only to sire heirs, lest he be derelict in his duty.

The cruelty with which he treated her would have been difficult for even the most long-suffering and resilient wife; for Diana, barely out of her teens, it was devastating. She thus sought, in an increasingly frenetic way, to find substitutes to being loved — luxury, fame, fashion, fitness, foreign travel, psychic readings, philanthropy and philandering. As the highest-wattage celebrity around, there were no shortage of unsatisfying solutions to her sadness.

“The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved,” said Mother Teresa.

The saint of the gutters knew that even a princess could be poor, as Diana was. That’s why she treated her with such tender kindness. Teresa lived amongst India’s most wretched, but also travelled to glittering cities where the rich and powerful were desperately lonely.

Diana lived the crisis of the age. St. Teresa of Calcutta knew the answer. It could be seen even in their bodies. Diana was stunningly beautiful, tall with coiffed hair, magnificent dresses, dripping with jewels. Mother Teresa was gnarled, bent over, a simple habit covering her hair, a tiny crucifix her only adornment.

The difference was in the eyes. Diana’s were pellucid with sorrow, windows on an unhappy heart. Teresa’s eyes were radiant with the joy of love, love of God and love of the poorest of the poor. Most people who met Mother Teresa said that she was beautiful. She really was not, by any standard, but those eyes! Through those windows shone a soul so bright that it lit up the whole world from some of the darkest places on Earth.

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