Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa of Calcutta (August 26 1910 - September 5 1997), was a world famous Catholic nun and founder of the Missionaries of Charity whose work among the poor of Calcutta was widely reported. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in October 2003, receiving a Catholic beatification name of Blessed Teresa.
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 Catholic, though the majority of their native Albania is Muslim, with a large Orthodox Christian minority.
Little is known of Teresa's early life except from her own reminiscences. 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 Sisters of Loreto 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 religious title Mother Teresa.
From 1929 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught at St Mary's High School in Calcutta, becoming its principal in 1944. She later said that 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, 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, Africa and Europe, including 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 fighting in Beirut, Lebanon, she convinced the parties to stop fighting so she could rescue 37 sick children.
Mother Teresa's work inspired other Catholics to affiliate themselves with her order. The Missionaries of Charity Brothers was founded in 1963, and 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.
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 Balzan Prize for promoting peace and brotherhood among the nations.
In 1982, Mother Teresa persuaded Israelis and Palestinians, who were in the midst of a skirmish, to cease fire long enough to rescue 37 mentally handicapped patients from a besieged hospital in Beirut.
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 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 collarbone. 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.
From the early 1970s, Mother Teresa began to attract some critical comments, although these views were rarely conveyed in the mainstream media. She was an outspoken critic of abortion, a viewpoint reflecting Roman Catholic Church teaching in Pope Paul VI's Humanae Vitae and strongly espoused by Pope John Paul II. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, she called abortion the "greatest destroyer of peace". She was also an outspoken critic of artificial contraception and lobbied against both on the political level. Her stances on abortion and contraception and her public campaigns on those issues led to strong criticism from pro-choice groups and campaigners, while many pro-life groups supported her viewpoint.
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 criticized for this stand in many media, including some Catholic ones.
In 1981, Teresa flew to Haiti to accept the Legion d'Honneur from the right-wing dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, who, after his ouster, was found to have stolen millions of dollars from the impoverished country. There she said that the Duvaliers "loved their poor," and that "their love was reciprocated." In 1987 Teresa visited Albania and visited the grave of the former Communist dictator Enver Hoxha. Critics said her actions compromised her perceived moral authority through unwise and controversial political associations; however, her supporters defended such associations, saying she had to deal with political realities of the time in order to lobby for her causes. By the time of her death, the Missionaries of Charity had houses in most Communist countries.
Criticism of Teresa in the United States grew 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, as was later revealed, embezzled UK£450 million from his employees' pension funds. There was no suggestion that she was aware of the theft, but she declined to return money donated to her movement, insisting that it was being spent to look after India's poor.
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 (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.
Chatterjee himself published The Final Verdict in 2003, a less polemic work than those of Hitchens and Ali, but equally critical of Teresa's operations. Hitchens, Ali and Chatterjee are all self-declared atheists.
Over the past decade a series of specific criticisms have been made of the conduct of Mother Teresa's operations by her and by those at a leadership level within the organisation.
Christopher 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."
In Christian belief, charity is a duty imposed on followers of Jesus Christ by scripture. Although many Protestant denominations believe salvation comes only through faith, with charitable works a duty of every Christian, Roman Catholicism places considerable emphasis on the performance of good works as a necessary (but not sole) condition of salvation.
In Catholicism, the combination of charitable works and evangelism has played a central role in the actions of some religious orders. To their defenders, the actions of Mother Teresa and her followers fulfilled that tradition. Her critics, however, viewed Mother Teresa as being preoccupied with the furtherance of Catholicism and its causes, rather than with alleviating poverty or offering medical help to the poor she treated. They also claim that Teresa gave a false impression of the nature of her work.
Some people complained 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. A 1998 article in the popular German Stern weekly 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 its global operations. Critics have argued that these sums far exceed the modest needs of the order, which offers little medical help and is staffed by nuns and volunteers. 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 Istituto per Opere Religiosi (colloquially known as 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, 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 the United Kingdom, 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." The implication was one of mismanagment of donations and a failure to turn non-financial donations into liquid assets for use in looking after the poor.
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 the central part of Teresa's calling. She perceived evangelisation as her central goal, with her care of the poor a secondary one, involving the bringing of "Christ to the poor." 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.
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 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 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 who 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) received a good Catholic funeral.
There have been reports that Teresa encouraged members of her order to baptise people who were dying, without regard to the individual's religion. Susan Shields alleged that Mother Teresa's order engaged in secret baptisms of Hindus and Moslems in its facilities. Teresa herself seemed 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's belief in the centrality of Christ and Roman Catholicism may have led her to believe that it was morally right to baptise Hindus and Muslims into Christianity in this manner, reflecting the pre-Vatican II belief that salvation is only through the Roman Catholic Church. However, many members of the Hindu and Islamic faith were critical of this alleged baptism programme, seeing the idea as disrespectful of their faiths and beliefs.
Early life and work
Teresa's accomplishments and deteriorating health
Criticism
photo published in Duvalier's propaganda newspaper L'Assaut'', January 1981.
larger versionCriticism of her motivations
Diversion of donations
Substandard medical care
Secret baptisms
External links
Additional reading
