Maternal and malignant: Mother Theresa and the case against sainthood
Her name is synonmous with saintly behaviour, but the truth is different, writes Mic Wright
Mother Theresa has become shorthand for piety, usually used as short hand to flag up a ‘normal’ person’s lesser moral standing (“She’s no Mother Theresa.”) but, while the missionary will soon bemade a saint by the Pope, the truth about her life is much more complicated.
Rather than always seeking to help the poor escape the slums she worked in, she often fetishised and glorified their suffering. Challenged in 1981 about the state of facilites run by her Missionaries of Charity order, she said:
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.
Her words concisely illustrate the fundamental malignancy at the heart of Mother Theresa’s work — she was a missionary but not a humanitarian. She essentially believed that poverty was God’s will.
Researchers from the University of Montreal investigated the flow of donations to Mother Theresa’s organisations — comparing the many millions sent to the basic conditions at its facilities.
One of the report’s authors, Serge Larivée, said: “Given the parsimonious management of Mother Theresa’s works, one may ask where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone?”
The report noted that doctors who visited many of the 517 factilities run by Mother Theresa and her order (presented as “homes for the dying”), they discovered unhygenic conditions and a shortage of food, painkillers and effective medical care.
Mother Theresa’s order raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
However, it appeared to do little to actually free those it encountered from poverty.
Meanwhile, when Mother Theresa herself required medical treatment, she received it in a modern American hospital, rather than one of the order’s own locations.
Christopher Hitchens, who wrote a book castigating Mother Theresa, said:
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.
To fund her activities, Mother Theresa was happy to pal around with some deeply unpleasant characters. In Hitchens’ pamphlet, ‘The Missionary Position’, he documents the dictators, criminals and con men, Mother Theresa was happy to be associated with and, in fact, actively supported.
Jean-Claude and Michelle Duvalier, the dictators who ruled Haiti as a police state from 1971 until an uprising in 1986, were friends of Mother Theresa’s and donated to her order. Before their regime fell and they fled, they extensively looted the country. During Mother Theresa’s visit to Haiti in 1981, she lauded the brothers as friends of the poor.
The fraudster, Charles Keating, who was jailed for his involvement in the Savings & Loan scam, which tricked customers into buying worthless bonds, was also a donor. He gave Mother Theresa $1.25 million in the 1980s, which bought him a letter from her asking for clemency from during his trial.
The prosecutor in the case, Deputy District Attorney Paul Turley, wrote to Mother Theresa asking her not to give her support to Keating and to return the money the fraudster had sent to the order:
Do not permit him the ‘indulgence’ he desires. Do not keep the money. Return it to those who worked for it and earned it!
He did not receive a reply.
Accepting an award from the International Health Organisation in 1989, Mother Theresa called AIDS “a just retribution for improper sexual conduct.”
10 years previously, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, she had dubbed abortion the “greatest threat to peace in the world.”
Though she received modern medical care when she was ill, she denied it to those who came to her clinics. As another critic of her methods and philosophy, Michael Hakeen — in his review of Hitchens’ book — wrote:
Mother Theresa [was] thoroughly saturated with a primitive fundamentalist worldview that sees pain, hardship and suffering as enobling experiences and a beautiful expression of affiliation with Jesus Christ and his ordeal on the cross.
Another of the researchers from the University of Montreal, Genevieve Chenard, argues that ‘Mother Theresa as saintly figure’ was largely a media invention:
We think it started with a movie shoot — which became the documentary ‘Something Beautiful For God’, lef by Mr (Malcolm) Muggeridge.
He went to Calcutta to see Mother Theresa and her work there. He wanted to film in the house of the dying and then there was little light there. So, the cameraman, Mr (Ken) McMillan, he used a new kind of Kodak film. When they saw the film, the shots were bright and, when Mr Muggeridge saw it, he claimed it was miracle. That is why she became popular in the media…
She also says an extremely small percentage of the money donated to the order actually went to medical care:
What we learned is that there was about $5 million in al the accounts. [Mother Theresa] raised almost $100 million before 1980. What happened is that around 5 to 7 percent went to the charity for medicines, things like that. The other money went to build some houses for the missionaires. Just five percent went to the cause.
That may explain why, in 1991, when Robin Fox, the the-editor of The Lancet medical journal, visited the Home for Dying Destitutes, he discovered ‘haphazard’ care being delivered by many unqualified staff members, due to a lack of doctors.
Fox also notes that the order made no distinction between the curable and incurable patients at the home, meaning some who might have survived remained in conditions where they were exposed to high risk of infection and, therefore, death.
Though Fox said he saw cleanliness and attention given to wounds and sores, as well as no shortage of kindness, he considered pain management at the facility to be “disturbingly lacking.”
He also wrote of needles not sterilised but washed warm water and then reused. Given that Mother Theresa called the facilities ‘houses of the dying,’ it seems she was less focused on survival and recovery than casual observers might have assumed.
The historian Vijay Prashad’s conclusion about Theresa’s work, published soon after her death in 1997, pulls no punches:
She] was part of a global enterprise for the alleviation of bourgeouis guilt, rather than a genuine challenge to those forces that produce and maintain poverty.
In his writings on Mother Theresa, Hitchens flags up Orwell’s view of saints in his essay on Gandhi. It’s worth rereading:
Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
Though the beatification process in the Catholic Church requires investigators to meet with critics of candidates for sainthood, it is prefunctory. The church, willing to ignore the statements of doctors and NGOs, is engaged in a media campaign — it needs Mother Theresa to be saint. The truth plays no part in that.
This article originally appeared on The Malcontent. Visit for more coverage of culture, media and politics as well as new original fiction.
