Mother Teresa


Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, known for most of her life as Mother Teresa,
(August 26, 1910 - September 5, 1997), Catholic nun and founder of the
Missionaries of Charity, became a figure of veneration within the Catholic
church, and admiration beyond it, for her work among the poor of Calcutta.
She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. But Teresa also became the
subject of sustained attacks from some writers, who accused her of
misappropriation of funds and exploiting the poor for her own
self-promotion. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in October 2003.

Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu was born in Uskub, a town in the Ottoman province of
Kosovo (now Skopje in the Republic of Macedonia), where her father was a
successful contractor. It is usually stated that her parents, Nikolla and
Dranafila Bojaxhiu, were Albanian, but it has been suggested that her father
may have been of Vlach descent. Her parents were unusual in being Catholics,
since most Albanians are either Muslims or Orthodox Christians.

Early Life and work

Little is known of Teresa's early life except what she later chose to
recall. She recounted that she felt a vocation to help the poor from the age
of 12, and decided to train for missionary work in India. At 18 she left
Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with a
mission in Calcutta. She chose the Loreto sisters because of their vocation
to provide education for girls. After a few months' training at the
Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dublin she was sent to Darjeeling in
India as a novice sister. In 1931, she made her first vows there, choosing
the name Teresa in honour of Teresa of Avila and Therese of Lisieux. She
took her final vows in May 1937, acquiring the title Mother Teresa.

From 1929 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught at St Mary's High School in Calcutta,
becoming its principal in 1944, but, she later said, the poverty all around
her a deep impression on her. In September 1946, by her own account, she
received a calling from God "to serve him among the poorest of the poor." In
1948 she received permission from Pope Pius XII, via the Archbishop of
Calcutta, to leave her community and live as an independent nun. She quit
the high school and, after a short course with the Medical Mission Sisters
in Patna, she returned to Calcutta and found temporary lodging with the
Little Sisters of the Poor. She then started an open-air school for homeless
children. Soon she was joined by voluntary helpers, and she received
financial support from church organisations and the municipal authorities.

In October 1950 Teresa received permission to start her own order, the
Missionaries of Charity, whose mission was to care for (in her own words)
"the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers,
all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society,
people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by
everyone."

With the help of Indian officials she converted an abandoned Hindu temple
into the Kalighat Home for the Dying, a free hospice for the very poor. Soon
after she opened another hospice, Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart), a home for
lepers called Shanti Nagar (Town of Peace), and an orphanage. The order soon
began to attract both recruits and charitable donations, and by the 1960s
had opened hospices, orphanges and leper houses all over India.

In 1965, by granting a Decree of Praise to the Congregation, Pope Paul VI
granted Mother Teresa's request to expand her order to other countries. The
order's first house outside India was in Venezuela, and others followed in
Rome and Tanzania, and eventually in many countries in Asia and Africa,
including even her native Albania. She travelled widely and became a media
figure, and this gave her the ability to intervene in international trouble
spots. In 1982 during the fighting in Beirut, she convinced the parties to
stop fighting so she could rescue 37 sick children.

Mother Teresa's work inspired other Catholics to affiliate themselves to her
order. The Missionaries of Charity Brothers was founded in 1963, a
contemplative branch of the Sisters followed in 1976. Lay Catholics and
non-Catholics were enrolled in the Co-Workers of Mother Teresa, the Sick and
Suffering Co-Workers, and the Lay Missionaries of Charity. In answer to the
requests of many priests, in 1981 Mother Teresa also began the Corpus
Christi Movement for Priests.

Teresa as Celebrity

In 1969 the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge, a Catholic convert, made a
documentary about Teresa called Something Beautiful for God. This highly
complimentary film, and the accompanying book, confered celebrity status on
Teresa, a status made more striking by her image of conspicuous poverty and
personal modesty. From this time onwards Teresa received many awards.

In 1971 Paul VI awarded her the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize. Other
awards bestowed upon her included a Kennedy Prize (1971), the Albert
Schweitzer International Prize (1975), the United States Presidential Medal
of Freedom (1985 and Congressional Medal of Honor (1994, honorary
citizenship of the United States (1996), and honorary degrees from a number
of universities.

In 1979 Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, "for work undertaken in
the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitute a
threat to peace." She used acceptance speech to condemn abortion, which in
line with Catholic teaching she considered to be murder: "Abortion is the
worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace," she said. "Because if a mother
can kill her own child, what will prevent us from killing ourselves or one
another? Nothing."

Teresa's stand on abortion was uncompromising even by Catholic standards. In
the aftermath of the 1971 India-Pakistan war, in which thousands of women
and girls in Bangladesh were raped, she made public appeals for the women to
keep their unborn babies, and not abort them. In 1993 she was asked about a
case in Ireland about a 14-year-old rape victim. She replied: "Abortion can
never be necessary because it is pure killing."

Also in line with Catholic teaching, she was opposed to contraception. At an
open air Mass in Knock, a Marian shrine in Ireland, she said: "Let us
promise Our Lady, who loves Ireland so much, that we will never allow in
this country a single abortion. And no contraceptives."

In 1985 Teresa suffered a heart attack in Rome. After a second attack in
1989 she received a pacemaker In 1991, after a bout of pneumonia while in
Mexico, she had further heart problems. She offered to resign her position
as head of the order, but was persuaded by her colleagues and the Pope to
continue. In 1996 she suffered from malaria, and underwent heart surgery,
but it was clear that her health was declining. She died in September 1997
aged 87.

At the time of her death Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity had over
4,000 sisters, an associated brotherhood of 300 members, and over 100,000
lay volunteers, operating 610 missions in 123 countries. These included
hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup
kitchens, children's and family counseling programs, orphanages and schools.

Beatification of Mother Teresa

Following Teresa's death in 1997, the Holy See began the process of
beatification, the first step towards possible canonisation, or sainthood.
This process requires the documentation of a miracle. In 2002, the Vatican
recognised as a miracle the healing of a tumour in the abdomen of an Indian
woman, Monica Besra, following the application of a locket containing
Teresa's picture.

This purported miracle attracted considerable controversy. Besra's husband
reportedly said that the lump in his wife's adomen was not cured by divine
intervention, but by hospital treatment. According to a report in Time
magazine, records of her treatment were removed by a member of Mother
Teresa's order. The Balurghat Hospital where Besra was treated reported
coming under pressure from the missionaries to acknowledge that the healing
process was the result of a miracle.

Teresa was formally beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 19, 2003, with
the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. A second authenticated miracle will be
required if she is to proceed to canonisation.

The Pope delivered a homily on Mother Teresa on the occasion of her
beatification. He said: "With particular emotion we remember today Mother
Teresa, a great servant of the poor, of the Church and of the whole world.
Her life is a testimony to the dignity and the privilege of humble service.
She had chosen to be not just the least but to be the servant of the least.
As a real mother to the poor, she bent down to those suffering various forms
of poverty. Her greatness lies in her ability to give without counting the
cost, to give "until it hurts". Her life was a radical living and a bold
proclamation of the Gospel."

Mother Teresa's critics

From the early 1970s Mother Teresa began to attract critical comment, partly
because of her outspoken comments on abortion, but mainly because of her
political associations. In 1975 she supported Indian Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi's suspension of democracy in India. She also supported Gandhi's son,
Sanjay Gandhi, in his highly unpopular population control campaign, which
involved forcible sterilisation. She was critized for this stand in many
media, including some Catholic ones.

In 1981, Teresa flew to Haiti to accept the Legion d'Honneur from the
dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. There she said that the Duvaliers "loved
their poor," and that "their love was reciprocated." Shortly afterwards the
Duvaliers were overthrown and went into exile, having stolen millions of
dollars from their impoverished country. In 1987 Teresa visited Albania for
the first time, and drew criticism when she visited the grave of the former
Communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

Criticism of Teresa in the United States grew sharper after it was revealed
that Charles Keating, who stole in excess of US$252 million in the Savings
and Loan scandal of the 1980s, had donated $1.25 million to Mother Teresa's
order. Teresa interceded on his behalf and wrote a letter to the court
urging leniency. She also accepted money from the British publisher Robert
Maxwell, who stole UK£450 million from his employees' pension funds.

An Indian-born writer living in Britain, Dr Aroup Chatterjee, who had
briefly worked in one of Mother Teresa's homes, began investigations into
the finances and other practices of Teresa's order. In 1994 two British
journalists, Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali (the latter a prominent
Trotskyist), produced a critical Channel 4 documentary Hell's Angel, based
on Chatterjee's work. The next year, Hitchens published The Missionary
Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, a pamphlet which repeated
many of the accusations in the documentary.

Hitchens described Mother Teresa's organisation as a cult which promoted
suffering and did not help those in need. Hitchens said that Teresa's own
words on poverty proved that her intention was not to help people. He quoted
Teresa's words at a 1981 press conference in which she was asked: "Do you
teach the poor to endure their lot?" She replied: "I think it is very
beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of
Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."

Chatterjee himself published The Final Verdict, a less polemical work than
those of Hitchens and Ali, but equally critical of Teresa's operations.
Hitchens, Ali and Chatterjee are all self-declared atheists.

Specific criticisms

Over the past decade a series of specific criticisms have been made of the
conduct of Mother Teresa's operations:

Misuse of donated funds

The Missionaries of Charity do not disclose either the sources of their
funds or details of how they are spent. In 1998 an article in the German
magazine Stern estimated that the order received about US$50 million a year
in donations. Other journalists have given estimates of US$100 million a
year. Critics have argued that this money cannot have all been spent on the
purpose for which it was donated - aid to the sick and the poor - because
the order's facilities, staffed by nuns and by volunteers and offering
little in the way of medical facilities, are very cheap to operate and
cannot cost anything like these sums to maintain.

Critics have maintained that the majority of the money donated to the order
is transferred to the Vatican Bank in Rome, where it is used by the Catholic
Church for its general purposes, or is transferred to non-Christian
countries for missionary work. Susan Shields, a former employee of the
Missionaries of Charity in the United States, has alleged that even when
donors explicitly marked money as, for example, "for the hungry in
Ethiopia", she was instructed not to send the money to Africa, while still
writing receipts with the text "For Ethiopia". Under the laws regulating
charities in most countries, this would amount to fraud and/or theft.

In Britain, where the law requires charitable organisations to disclose
their expenditures, an audit in 1991 concluded that only 7% of the total
income of about US$2.6 million went into charitable spending, with the rest
being remitted to the Vatican Bank. Another former Missionary of Charity
worker, Eva Kolodziej, has said: "You should visit the House in New York,
then you'll understand what happens to donations. In the cellar of the
homeless shelter there are valuable books, jewellery and gold. What happens
to them? The sisters receive them with smiles, and keep them. Most of these
lie around uselessly forever." This would suggest not so much deliberate
misappropriation as financial incompetence and indifference to the ends to
which donated funds are put.

Related to this is the accusation that funds donated for relief work for the
sick and poor were actually diverted to missionary work in non-Christian
countries. Chatterjee alleged that many operations of the order engage in no
charitable activity at all but instead use their funds for missionary work.
He alleged, for example, that none of the eight facilities that the
Missionaries of Charity run in Papua New Guinea have any residents in them,
being purely for the purpose of converting local people to Catholicism.

Defenders of the order argue that missionary activity was part of Teresa's
calling and that there was nothing wrong with using donated funds for this
purpose. Chatterjee and other critics counter that the public image of
Mother Teresa as a "helper of the poor" was misleading, and that only a few
hundred people are served by even the largest of the homes. Stern magazine
alleged the (Protestant) Assembly of God charity serves 18,000 meals daily
in Calcutta, many more than all the Mission of Charity homes together.

Inadequate provision of services

Another area of criticism is the nature of the services that the order
provides with the funds donated to it. There have been a series of reports
documenting inattention to medical care in the order's facilities. Dr Robin
Fox, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet visited the Home for
Dying Destitutes in Calcutta and described the care the patients recieved as
'haphazard.' He observed that although there were doctors who called in from
time to time, decisions about patient care were usually made by the sisters
and volunteers (some of whom have medical knowledge).

Fox conceded that the regimen he observed included cleanliness, the tending
of wounds and sores, and loving kindness. But he noted that the sisters'
approach to managing pain was disturbingly lacking. The formulary at the
facility he visited lacked even strong analgesics, a lack that he felt
clearly separated Mother Teresa's approach from the hospice movement.

Mary Louden, who had spent time as a volunteer worker in one of the
mission's homes, wrote in May 3, 1992 issue of The Guardian that the home at
Kalighat consisted of two rooms, each with around 40 patients in stretcher
beds, sandwiched between pieces of green plastic and small, scratchy
blankets. She reported that on admission the patients' heads were shaved,
their clothes removed, and any possessions confiscated. Patients wore a
knee-length western-style overall that tied at the neck and gapes open at
the back, and no underwear was provided. She described the food as
nutritionally inadequate and always the same, the water disease ridden, and
the volunteers largely unable to speak Bengali. Patients were left with
nothing to do and nowhere to go. Families were strongly discouraged from
visiting their relatives at the home.

In one case of a patient that died of tuberculosis, Louden reported being
told by an American doctor working at Kalighat that the patient might have
lived if she had received some hospital treatment. Louden described Mother
Teresa's policy as one of non-intervention, in which God decides who lives
and who dies and people are better off in heaven than in the operating
theatre. Louden believed that Mother Teresa and her sisters declined to use
their influence and income to finance a properly equipped hospital, instead
devoting their efforts to ensure that everyone (regardless of creed) got a
good Catholic funeral.

This latter point is important, because it suggests that many of the
criticisms of Mother Teresa's charity work arise from the wide gulf between
her understanding of the purpose of charity and the understandings of her
critics, who are mostly from western countries and in many cases atheists.

Charity is a duty imposed on Christians by scripture, and in the case of
Catholics the performance of good works is also a necessary (though not a
sufficient) condition of salvation. One of the purposes of Christian charity
is certainly to relieve suffering and distress, but that is not the only
purpose, and for some Catholics it is not the primary purpose. For all
Catholics the saving of souls is more important than any material
consideration, and for a particularly zealous (and in some ways
unsophisticated) Catholic like Mother Teresa, it seems to have been the
overriding consideration.

From Mother Teresa's point of view, the point of her charitable work was not
to provide western style social services, western style medical care (or
indeed any kind of medical care), or even western style hospice care. It was
to bring relief and spiritual peace to the dying person, and if possible to
asist that person to die "a good Catholic death" and to receive "a good
Catholic burial."

Secret baptisms

This point is reinforced by reports of the practice of baptism of the dying,
regardless of the individual's religion, reported in the order's facilities.
Susan Shields alleged that Mother Teresa's order frequently engaged in
clandestine baptisms of Hindus and Moslems in its facilities. Teresa herself
appeared to confirm this in a speech at the Scripps Clinic in California in
January 1992, when she said: "Something very beautiful... not one has died
without receiving the special ticket for St Peter, as we call it. We call
baptism ticket for St Peter. We ask the [dying] person do you want a
blessing by which your sins will be forgiven and you receive God? They have
never refused. So 29,000 have died in that one house [in Kalighat] from the
time we began in 1952." Teresa seems to have seen nothing wrong with
inducing Hindus and Muslims to accept Christian baptism in this manner.

Abuse of patients

Mother Teresa is also held responsible by critics for the conditions of care
in her stations. Chatterjee cites a Calcutta priest, Debi Charan Haldar, who
gave an interview in the December 1990 issue of Calcutta Skyline in which he
said: "Many Sisters belonging to the Missionaries of Charity are very harsh
towards the patients at Nirmal Hriday. Almost every night we hear
heartrending cries from these old patients. I suspect the Sisters indulge in
physical torture." In September 2000, Teresa's successor Sister Nirmala
admitted that one nun working in a Calcutta shelter run by the Missionaries
had tortured four young street children with a hot knife. According to
Nirmala, the children had tried to steal money.