Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa of Calcutta (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. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in October 2003, and Catholics call her Blessed Teresa.
Criticism of Teresa mounted, as her popularity waxed, reaching a crescendo at her turn of the century beatification.
Early life and work
Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Uskub, a town in the Ottoman province of Kosovo (now Skopje in the Republic of Macedonia), where her father was a successful contractor. Her parents had three children, and Teresa was the youngest. 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.
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 Sister Mary Teresa in honour of Teresa of Avila and Thérèse 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 left 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.
In 1971 Mother Teresa first became well known in the West following the publication of the book by Malcolm Muggeridge Something Beautiful for God. She became a media figure and travelled widely, 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.
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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's accomplishments and deteriorating health
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 1972 Mother Teresa was awarded the Nehru Prize for her promotion of international peace and understanding.
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." Mother Teresa's acceptance speech. In the same year, she was also awarded the the Balzan Prize for promoting peace and brotherhood among the nations.
In 1982, Mother Teresa persuades Israelis and Palestinians, who are in the midst of a skirmish to cease fire long enough to rescue 37 mentally handicapped patients from a besieged hospital in Beruit.
In 1983 Teresa suffered a heart attack in Rome, while visiting Pope John Paul II. 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. A vote secret ballot vote was carried out, and all the nuns, except herself, voted for Mother Teresa to stay. Mother Teresa agreed to continue her work as head of the Missionaries of Charity.
Mother Teresa became an honorary citizen of the United States on November 16, 1996.
In April, 1997, Mother Teresa fell and broke her collerbone. Later that year, in August, she suffered from malaria, and failure of the left heart ventricle. She underwent heart surgery, but it was clear that her health was declining. On March 13, 1997, she stepped down from the head of Missionaries of Charity and died in September 1997 at the age of 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.
Criticism mounts
From the early 1970s Mother Teresa began to attract some critical comments, although these views were rarely conveyed in the mainstream media. Progressives viewed her increasingly outspoken condemnation of abortion (which she called the "greatest destroyer of peace" in her Nobel Prize speech) and her opposition to artificial contraception as reactionary and dangerous. Mother Teresa fully supported the papal doctrine on both matters and used her global influence for political lobbyism in many countries.
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.
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photo published in Duvalier's propaganda newspaper L'Assaut, January 1981.
larger version
Criticism of Teresa in the United States grew sharper after it was revealed that Charles Keating, who, according to prosecutors, 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.
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later convicted of fraud in the United States.
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 in 2003, 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.
Diversion of donations
Some people complain that Mother Teresa and her followers accepted donations specifically earmarked to and the sick and the poor, but that the funds were used for non-charitable purposes, particularly evangelism. Some of these complaints amount to accusations of fraud.
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 quoted a witness account according to which the order received about US$50 million a year in donations on its New York account alone. Other journalists have given estimates of US$100 million a year for the global operations. 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. Furthermore, volunteers have stated that they were specifically instructed not to use the money to purchase medical equipment.
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 a certain degree of 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.
Substandard medical care
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 received 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). Robin Fox observed that Teresa's order does not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, so that people who would could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment.
Fox conceded that the regimen he observed included cleanliness, the tending of wounds and sores, and 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.
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 assist that person to die "a good Catholic death" and to receive "a good Catholic burial." This is of course in contradiction with the perception among many secularists of the purpose of charity.
Vicarious baptisms
There have been reports that Teresa encouraged members of her order to carry out the practice of baptism on people who were dying, without regard to the individual's religion.
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 expiring Hindus and Muslims to accept Christian baptism in this manner.
Allegations of torture
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."
Mother Teresa is also held responsible by critics for the conditions of care in her stations. Whether cries at night were the natural result of fatal illness, or caused deliberately by staff is not addressed by Haldar's accusation.
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. Sister Nirmala condemned the incident and said, "Children should not be treated badly. We have initiated an inquiry into the incident. The guilty will be punished. I will request you all to help us serve the children better."
External links
- The Nobel Prize Biography
- CNN - 'Angel of Mercy'
- TIME magazine 100 People of the Century
- 'Saint to the Rich' by Christopher Hitchens
- Vatican Biography
- Aroup Chatterjee's The Final verdict
Additional reading
- Malcolm Muggeridge Something Beautiful for God ISBN 0060660430
- Becky Benenate, Joseph Durepos (eds) Mother Teresa: No Greater Love (Fine Communications, 2000) ISBN 1567314015
- Aroup Chatterjee: Mother Teresa. The Final Verdict (Meteor Books, 2003). ISBN 8188248002 Full text (without pictures). Critical examination of Agnes Bojaxhiu's life and work.
- Bijal Dwivedi, Mother Teresa: Woman of the Century
- Christopher Hitchens: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995) ISBN 185984054X
- Susan Shields, "Mother Teresa's House of Illusions". Free Inquiry Magazine, Volume 18, Number 1. Online copy.
- Kathryn Spink, Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography. ISBN 0062508253.
- Mother Teresa et al, Mother Teresa: In My Own Words. ISBN 0517201690.
- Walter Wüllenweber, "Nehmen ist seliger denn geben. Mutter Teresa - wo sind ihre Millionen?" Stern (illustrated German weekly), September 10, 1998. English translation.