Mother Teresa was a Macedonian-born Indian nun famous for her charitable activities. She even received the Nobel Peace Prize for her works towards relieving the sufferings of the poor and distressed.
Yet, according to a new British documentary she worked with ulterior motives and covered up the worst excesses of the Catholic church.
A compelling new three-part Sky documentary series Mother Teresa: For The Love Of God, claims that Mother Teresa seemed more attracted to poverty and pain than actually helping people escape it.
She believed that the poor and sick must suffer like Jesus, and siphoned off millions of donations she received in India to the Vatican City.
The documentary substantiates its tantalizing claims by talking to some of Mother Teresa’s closest friends and bitterest critics and serves as a thorough reappraisal of one of the most famous women of the last century.
Abuse of Sicks and Poor
There was widespread abuse of the poor and sick in the Missionaries of Charities run by Mother Teresa.
British doctor Jack Preger who worked there was shocked by what he witnessed as the nuns weren’t delivering proper care.
“Needles were used over and over unsterilized. One woman with burns was refused painkillers – I smuggled some in for her”, he claims in the documentary.
“They had the money to run a decent hospital for poor people, but they never did. Instead, they said, ‘We will pray for the alleviation of pain without providing treatment”, he adds further.
According to Canadian academics Serge Larivée, Geneviève Chénard, and Carole Sénéchal, Mother Teresa’s clinics received millions of dollars in donations but lacked medical care, systematic diagnosis, necessary nutrition, and sufficient analgesics for those in pain.
In the opinion of the three academics, Mother Teresa believed the poor and sick must suffer as Christ did on the cross.
Nuns were asked to Whip themselves
The pain was not just a by-product of her work, but an integral part of it. Nuns were instructed to whip themselves and wear wire chains with spikes on them.
Mary Johnson, who worked with Mother Teresa for 20 years, says, ‘Her spirituality was connected to Jesus on the cross.
‘He gave his life in pain and she believed that to give of oneself with suffering was the greatest value. The idea was that suffering redeemed the world.’
‘She thought being poor was good because Jesus was poor. It’s schizophrenic,’ says Mary Johnson.
However, Christopher Hitchens, one of Mother Teresa’s most outspoken critics says that her activities return us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor.
“She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction”, he claims.
Christopher Hitchens also accused Mother Teresa of hypocrisy for choosing advanced treatment for her heart condition.
Mother Teresa’s Ulterior Motives
According to Hitchens, Mother Teresa’s intention was not to help people, and she lied to donors about how their contributions were used.
“It was by talking to her that I discovered, and she assured me, that she wasn’t working to alleviate poverty”, he said, “She was working to expand the number of Catholics.
She used to say, “I’m not a social worker. I don’t do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church”.
Although Hitchens thought he was the only witness called by the Holy See, Aroup Chatterjee the author of Mother Teresa: The Untold Story was also called to present evidence opposing Mother Teresa’s beatification and canonization.
Child-abuse scandals of the Church
The last decade of Mother Teresa’s life was perhaps the most difficult.
She was struggling with old age, but the Vatican church was calling on her to help save it from the growing scandal of child abuse by priests.
‘They would send her to towns where scandals were being unearthed,’ says Mary. ‘She could change the story.’
How much did she know? It’s impossible to say but, as revealed in the show, when Jesuit priest Donald McGuire was suspected of child abuse, she wrote a letter to the authorities insisting on her ‘confidence and trust in him.
It left him free to abuse hundreds of boys for another decade. Even when the Jesuit Priest was finally convicted of sexually molesting multiple children in 2006, Mother Teresa publicly defended him.
Mother Teresa’s involvement in the child-abuse scandal was hushed up, but her legacy had been tainted. Was she saint or sinner… or a bit of both? asks the British documentary.
Tainted Legacy of Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa was born as Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in North Macedonia in 1910 in a devout Catholic family. At the age of 12, she took solace in the church and decided to become a nun.
At 18 she went to Ireland to join the Catholic Sisters of Loreto order, and a year later she moved to Calcutta, now Kolkata.
She claimed that witnessing the misery and death caused by the Bengal famine of 1943 had a profound impact on her and that three years later Jesus spoke to her on a train, giving her fresh instructions.
Subsequently, she started her own order, the Missionaries of Charity with the permission of the Church. She asked the Bengal government for some land where she could care for people with leprosy.
She was given more than double the amount of land she had hoped for after she reduced the governor to tears by talking about the sufferings of the sick and poor.
“She had the cunning of a peasant and was very focused though slightly obstinate”, claims Navin Chawla, a civil servant who was present during her meetings with the Governor.
After BBC made a documentary on her in 1969, she became an overnight celebrity, and hordes of money poured into her missionary activities, and in 1979 she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
By the 1980s around £100 million, a year was coming into her organization, but most of it was being paid into the Vatican bank.
