The Mother Teresa Myth

Note: A couple years ago, we discussed Mother Teresa and her unearned reputation. I recently rewrote the episode and have posted the new version here. 

      Mother Teresa is a cultural symbol of compassion, love for the poor, and dedication to a greater purpose. If you read almost anything written about her, you’ll see that she’s presented as the embodiment of sacrifice and humility, a rare beacon who served as an inspiration to the rest of humanity. According to historian Ruth Tucker, Mother Teresa was the first religious figure in history to be revered during her lifetime by Christians of all denominations. If we decide, however, to examine the facts of Mother Teresa’s life without the standard awe and reverence, we may see a different figure. In reality, the mainstream portrait of Mother Teresa as a moral icon is completely at odds with her actions and her own words. It is not an exaggeration to say that Mother Teresa was a fraud who behaved like a masochist and that her life’s work greatly increased the amount of suffering in the world. Per Mother Teresa’s own words, she had no interest in alleviating poverty or suffering. She took millions of dollars in donations, managed it suspiciously, and did not spend it on the poor. She worked to repair the reputations of political tyrants and increase her own fame. Her medical practices were horrifying and may have even intentionally increased suffering. She was dogmatically opposed to divorce, abortion, and the use of contraceptives, even in the densely overpopulated country of India. If you were laboring under the illusion that she was a morally virtuous woman who dedicated her life to apolitical humanitarian work, and that we should all venerate her regardless of our religious persuasion, I hope you can be disabused of the myth of Mother Teresa. 

      Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, having worked for Mother Teresa, was baffled and frustrated when he moved to the United Kingdom in 1985 and discovered the saintly reputation she had acquired in the West. He conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with nuns and volunteers to discover that Mother Teresa’s practices were even worse than he had witnessed during his tenure. Despite her clinics receiving millions of dollars in donations, their conditions were appalling. Needles were routinely reused with no sterilization and there was a disturbing shortage of medical care and basic nutrition, as well as an intentional lack of painkillers. Her residents lay in agony in hammocks or stretcher beds, many with their heads shaved. Friends and family members were prohibited from visiting the afflicted residents, which is highly unusual. Blankets stained with feces were washed in the same sink used to clean dishes, and residents were forced to defecate in the presence of one another. Though she denied basic medical care to those under her, she never spared any expense for her own health. For example, she received the best Western medicine and treatment for her heart problems. Chatterjee wrote that Mother Teresa had an “obsession with suffering.” She believed that “Suffering [is] a gift from God,” and once quipped, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.” She never claimed to want to alleviate poverty or suffering, and she said as much whenever anyone bothered to ask. As the English journalist Christopher Hitchens put it, “She was not a friend of the poor; she was a friend of poverty.” Of course, she did want to “work with the poor” and said so on many occasions. Decent people interpret such a sentiment to mean interest in reducing poverty, but not Mother Teresa. Suffering and poverty, on her account, are beautiful gifts that encourage spiritual development. As with abstaining from adequate medical treatment, this seemed to apply less to herself and more to those in her care. 

      Saint Teresa of Calcutta was born Anjezë Bojaxhiu (pronounced Agnus Boy-ah-chew). She chose the name Teresa for herself, in honor of the patron saint of missionaries, Thérèse de Lisieux. Missionary work was her passion; she used the millions of dollars in donations she received to build nunneries which accomplish nothing but the training of more missionaries. Rather than use the millions of dollars at her disposal to alleviate suffering and poverty, she spent most of her money on missionary work to the end of increasing the number of Catholics. According to Serge Larivée, a researcher at the University of Montreal, Mother Teresa only offered prayers and medallions of the Virgin Mary to victims of natural disasters rather than any aid, monetary or otherwise. Hitchens wrote one of the only critical books on Mother Teresa (according to Larivée, it’s one of five critical books in existence). Hitchens had the opportunity to speak to Mother Teresa personally and offered his criticism of some of her practices. He reported, “It was by talking to her that I discovered, and she assured me, that she wasn’t working to alleviate poverty. She was working to expand the number of Catholics. She said, ‘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.’” So don’t take my word for it — take her word for it. She’s not doing social work; she’s only trying to convert more Catholics. This fact was not lost on many Indians. Chatterjee described Mother Teresa’s missionary work as “an imperialist venture of the Catholic Church against an Eastern population.” Mohan Bhagwat, chief of a major Indian political party, said in a speech that “Mother Teresa’s work had ulterior motives, which were to convert the person who was being served to Christianity.” According to Fr. Leo Maasburg, a fan of Mother Teresa’s, she would often baptize Hindu patients without their consent or understanding. 

      Mother Teresa’s kept questionable political contacts, to put it mildly. She praised the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, a notoriously bloody and corrupt regime. Under their decades-long rule, tens of thousands of Haitians were tortured and killed, while hundreds of thousands fled and became refugees. At the time, Haiti suffered the most crippling poverty in the Western Hemisphere while the Duvaliers maintained an opulent and lavish lifestyle at the expense of the Haitian population under their rule. In 1980, in the midst of their dictatorship, Saint Teresa of Calcutta flew to Haiti and accepted a medal from President Duvalier. She told bewildered reporters that she had “never seen the poor people being so familiar with their head of state as they were with the Duvaliers. . . . It was a beautiful lesson for me. I’ve learned something from it.” 

      Mother Teresa also accepted millions of dollars from Charles Keating, the savings-and-loan fraud who made his money by stealing it from the elderly. Over twenty-thousand people lost large sums of money because of Keating’s scams. A significant portion of the victims lost their entire life savings, many of them retirees. L. Seidman, the FDIC chair at the time, later wrote that this was “one of the most heartless and cruel frauds in modern memory.” In return for the millions of dollars she received from Keating, as well as the use of his private jet, Mother Teresa gave him a trinket that she had “blessed”. When Keating’s fraud was exposed, the courts asked her to return the money to whom it had been stolen. She declined. Her letter, preserved by the California court it was addressed to, read that she did not know anything about Keating’s fraud. She said, “I only know that he has always been kind and generous to God’s poor, and always ready to help whenever there was a need.” 

      In addition to her political and charitable work described thus far, Mother Teresa was also a tireless opponent of women’s rights. She campaigned to keep divorce illegal in Ireland, while simultaneously congratulating Princess Diana on her divorce, publicly offering her well wishes. A poor woman in Ireland with a wife-beating husband can never hope for anything better, but a wealthy, famous woman can leave for any reason and receive Mother Teresa’s stamp of approval. Thankfully, Mother Teresa failed in her efforts to force Catholic morals on the entire population through the state, and now, women are legally allowed to leave abusive relationships because she did not succeed. 

During a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Mother Teresa claimed that “the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion.” Whatever you may think about abortion, no one can honestly assert that it’s the obstacle preventing world peace. Campaigning in Ireland, she said, “Let us promise . . . that we will never allow in this country a single abortion,” before adding, “and no contraceptives,” to smattering applause from a confused crowd. These are not the words of an apolitical humanitarian. Keep in mind she worked in India, one of the most overpopulated regions on earth. This overpopulation greatly contributes to the appalling poverty in India, which, of course, she had no interest in alleviating. Her message of “no contraceptives” accomplished nothing but increase the amount of suffering and poverty in the world, as well as prevent women from controlling their own reproduction. This was one of her primary goals; she devoted much of her time not to aiding the poor, but rather, campaigning against abortion and contraceptives. Hitchens wrote, “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.” 

      If she had no interest in aiding the poor, alleviating suffering, helping women, or doing anything other than increasing the number of Catholics in the world, how was the myth of Mother Teresa generated to begin with? Her first taste of the media spotlight came in the form of a 1969 BBC program entitled Something Beautiful for God, directed by Malcolm Muggeridge. The film and subsequent book portrayed Mother Teresa in the way we’ve come to expect — a humble, solemn servant of God and the poor. Muggeridge also propagated a dubious miracle story from the filming of the BBC documentary that helped create the divine aura that surrounded Mother Teresa until her death. A crewmember recounting the story of the miracle said that “there was an episode where we were taken to a building that Mother Teresa called the House of the Dying, and [the director] said ‘Well, it’s very dark in here. Do you think we can get anything?’” The crew had just taken delivery of some new film made by Kodak, which they hadn’t had time to test before we left. They filmed in the darkened rooms with the special film, and it worked quite well. They crewman recalled, “I said, ‘that’s amazing! That’s extraordinary!’ And I was going to say, you know, three cheers for Kodak. I didn’t get a chance to say that, because Malcolm [Muggeridge] spun around and said, ‘It’s divine light! It’s Mother Teresa! You’ll find that it’s divine light, old boy!’ And three or four days later, I was being phoned by journalists from London newspapers who were saying things like, ‘We hear that you’ve just come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and you were the witness of a miracle.’”

      Kodak manufactured film that worked in the dark; a superstitious director, unaware of this, attributed something he couldn’t explain to the divine. The news of the first television miracle spread like wildfire, and from there, Teresa’s media appearances increased. For the last few decades of her life, you could find her touring the world in private jets and helicopters, appearing with TV stars and other powerful people, basking in the fame and raking in donations that never went to the poor. 

      So how does this myth remain afloat? “Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and he can sleep ’til noon,” said Mark Twain. Her persona eclipsed anything that even she could say. No matter what she said or did, in no matter how mainstream a publication, nearly everyone — including the reporters themselves —  continued to perceive her as the moral icon most know her to be. The tone of the coverage of Mother Teresa never diverged far from Muggeridge’s original portrayal of her. This worshipful handling, combined with her knack for self-promotion, snowballed into the famous reputation she retains to this day. Another reason it’s difficult to break the spell is that the Catholic Church, one the richest and most powerful organizations in human history, wants it to remain unbroken. Mother Teresa was an excellent public relations figure for the church, which they’re desperate for in the midst of a decades-long, ongoing barrage of child sex abuse scandals. It’s also possible that the public simply doesn’t want to be disillusioned. Some have speculated that her mythos soothes our first-world guilt. “The rich world has a poor conscience,” Christopher Hitchens observed. “It wants, in fact, it needs, to think that someone, somewhere, is doing something about the third world, and the Mother Teresa myth ministers to this desire.” Additionally, the press is highly complicit in the perpetuation of her reputation. An article from the Washington Post used the phrase “frugality and simplicity” to describe the reuse, without sterilization, of hypodermic needles and facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another. When her reputation is simply taken as a matter of course, practices more questionable than that fly under the radar. This kind of unquestioning press coverage for Mother Teresa is boilerplate, and if you dare challenge it in any mainstream forum, prepare to be met with fury and wrath from all quarters, as were Hitchens and Chatterjee. It simply does not matter what she says or what is reported; no one’s opinion of her will respond. Teresa was once — and still is, to a large extent — an unassailable figure. Her few public critics were rewarded for their honesty and integrity with venomous public backlashes. Hitchens and Chatterjee’s work did not earn them many friends. However, over time, their account of Mother Teresa has withstood scrutiny and the weight of evidence continues to grow on the side of those who see Mother Teresa for what she really was: A sadist and fraud. 

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Works Cited 

Barton, Adriana. “Mother Teresa was ‘anything but a Saint,’ Canadian study says.” The Globe and Mail. 2013. 

“Charges filed against ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier in Haiti.” CNN. 2011.

Chatterjee, Aroup. “Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict.” 2002. 

“Hell’s Angel.” BBC Channel 4. YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJG-lgmPvYA

Hitchens, Christopher. “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.” 2012. 

Larivée, Serge et al. The dark sides of Mother Teresa. 2013. 

Maasburg, Leo. “Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait.” 2011. 

“Mother Teresa: The Greatest Destroyer of Peace is Abortion.” YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5XZC6OA2_c

Mother Teresa Said to Gain After Receiving a Pacemaker. New York Times. 1989.

Schultz, Kai. “A Critic’s Lonely Quest: Revealing the Whole Truth About Mother Teresa.” New York Times, 2016.

Taylor, Adam. “Why Mother Teresa is still no saint to many of her critics.” The Washington Post, 2016.

Tucker, Ruth. Mother Teresa. Christian History. 2000. 

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