Mother Teresa, atheist?

Frankly, I don't know what to make of this one.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the nun who devoted her life to helping the poorest of the poor in India, severely doubted the existence of God, according to her letters and diaries.

She wrote things like this (emphasis mine):

The damned of Hell suffer eternal punishment because they experiment with the loss of God.

In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist.

I have a couple different reactions to this. In one sense it makes me admire her more. I mean, as an atheist, I too find the universe pretty cold and unwelcoming, and while I've come to terms with that, I'll admit that on some level I envy people who are so confident of an eternal reward for goodness that they can spend their lives sacrificing for the good of others and find joy in that. I always assumed Mother Teresa was in that category--but, apparently, she spent her life helping the destitute with no expectation that she'd actually ever get a thing out of it. That's pretty laudable.

Where I run into trouble is some of the other religious gibberish she went along with. She was extremely anti-birth-control, a significant fact when you consider that she was doing her work in one of the most overpopulated places on the planet. And she spoke out forcefully against abortion, calling it, absurdly enough, the worst humanitarian crisis going on in the world.

It's one thing to believe these things from a position of religious faith. I mean, yes, it's destructive, but at least I can see where it's coming from.

But, if God doesn't really exist, that inescapably means that the Vatican is nothing but a bunch of sex-starved octogenarians in funny hats, trying to divine meaning from a very flawed bronze-age text. Why on earth would someone who did not think there was an omnipotent being guiding John Paul II's hand deny birth control to a starving, overpopulated place purely on his say-so?