The Mother Teresa Debate

In 1982 Mother Teresa was asked whether she was a saint. “Please, let me die first,” she responded. In the public perception, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity was a living saint before her death on September 5, 1997. Were it not for the Church’s exhaustive process of inquiry before canonisation can take place, Mother Teresa doubtless would have become a saint by public acclamation.

 

St Pope John Paul II knew that and accordingly sped up the process that led to Mother Teresa’s beatification in 2003, albeit controversially so.

For all the world Mother Teresa looked like a woman of uncomplicated piety, but she experienced profound spiritual turmoil — an echo of the internal struggles suffered by her saintly namesakes, St Teresa of Avila and St Therse of Lisieux — which she believed would deny her a place in heaven.

Mother Teresa’s letters that detail her spiritual suffering, published in 2007 as Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, are instructive reading for those who are feeling, as she did, the absence of God in their lives — the dark night of the soul, as St John of the Cross called it.

Mother Teresa felt abandoned by Jesus, but she did not abandon him. Her suffering in the spiritual desert gave her an empathy with those whom she was helping in the slums of Kolkata, the rejects of society.

But her canonisation this year will also revive allegations levelled against her, most venomously by the late atheist activist Christopher Hitchens.

In a 1994 television documentary titled Hell’s Angel and his 1995 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Mr Hitchens accused Mother Teresa of legitimising brutal dictators and accepting money from thieves, and charged her with allowing inferior conditions in her Home for the Dying, which she founded in Kolkata.

Some of these allegations will have potency. Ethical questions may be raised by Mother Teresa’s links to despots such as Haiti’s Duvalier dynasty, and her acceptance of donations from them and their likes, or from the Irish fraudster Charles Keating.

One may also concede that the medical care provided in the Home for the Dying did not meet the standards of institutions in the West, particularly in the administration of palliative medication.

But even if the level of medical intervention failed to meet best standards, Mother Teresa and her congregation provided care to those who otherwise would not have received any.

Those who died in the care of the Missionaries of Charity did so while being cared for with love, their dignity as human beings intact. Not every Western hospice can make that claim, no matter how well-stocked their pharmacies.

Whatever credibility Mr Hitchens’ allegations might have had, they were diminished by his obvious agenda and his choice of language — notwithstanding how one feels about Mother Teresa, she was no “ghoul”, and her lifestyle did not support his allegation that she took money for personal gain.

Most tellingly, Mr Hitchens attacked Mother Teresa for her strong opposition to abortion and artificial contraception, as if he expected a leading Catholic to be in favour of such things. His inclusion of that argument betrayed his real agenda: one that had little to do with fundraising methods, accounting practices or palliative care standards.

When Mr Hitchens’ character assassination is revived, as it inevitably will be, then Catholics will do well to remember two things.

Firstly, while Mr Hitchens raised legitimate concerns, even while failing to document all of these adequately, his work on Mother Teresa was driven by a particular agenda which he didn’t even care to disguise. His conclusions cannot be trusted.

Secondly, even if everything that Mr Hitchens claimed corresponded with the facts — and facts tend to be subject to interpretation which can lead to conflicting conclusions — none represent an obstacle to canonisation, because the proclamation of sainthood is not akin to a lifetime achievement award, nor does it demand unfailing perfection of the subject.

At its very basic definition, the canonised sainthood is the confirmation that an individual is in heaven with God. For those who believe in the second life, there is no doubt that Mother Teresa is indeed with God — regardless of what she or Christopher Hitchens thought.