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. She
was a member of the youth group in her local parish called Sodality.
At 18, the Vatican granted Teresa permission to leave Skopje and
join 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 de Lisieux. She took her final vows in
May 1937, acquiring the religious title Mother Teresa.
From 1929 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught geography and catechism 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.
Foundation of the Missionaries of Charity
In October 1950 Teresa received Vatican permission to start her
own order, which the Vatican originally labeled as the Diocesan
Congregation of the Calcutta Diocese, but which later became known
as 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 poor. Soon after she opened another hospice, Nirmal Hriday (Pure
Heart), a home for lepers called Shanti Nagar (City 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. Teresa's
order started to rapidly grow, with new homes opening all over the
globe. 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 addition, the
first Missionaries of Charity home in the United States was established
in the South Bronx, New York.
International fame
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.
By the early 1970s, Mother Teresa had become an international celebrity.
Her fame can be in large part attributed to the 1969 documentary
Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge and his 1971 book
of the same title, which is still in print. During the filming of
the documentary footage taken in poor lighting conditions, particularly
the Home for the Dying, was thought unlikely to be of usable quality
by the crew. When, after returning from India, the footage was found
to be extremely well lit. Muggeridge claimed this was 'divine light'
from Mother Teresa herself. Others in the crew thought it more likely
ascribable to a new type of Kodak film. Muggeridge later converted
to Catholicism.
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 the Congressional Gold
Medal (1994), honorary citizenship of the United States (November
16, 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." She refused the conventional
ceremonial banquet given to laureates, and asked that the $6,000
funds would be diverted to the poor in Calcutta. When Mother Teresa
received the prize, she was asked, "What can we do to promote
world peace?" Her answer: "Go home and love your family."
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.
Deteriorating health and death
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. In 1991, returning to her home country, she opened
a home in Tirana, Albania.
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.
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.
Mother Teresa was granted a full state funeral by the Indian Government
in gratitude for her services to the poor of all religions in India.
Her death was widely considered a great tragedy within both secular
and religious communities. The former U.N. Secretary-General Javier
Pérez de Cuéllar, for example, said: "She is
the United Nations. She is peace in the world." Nawaz Sharif,
the Prime Minister of Pakistan said that Teresa was "A rare
and unique individual who lived long for higher purposes. Her life-long
devotion to the care of the poor, the sick and the disadvantaged
was one of the highest examples of service to humanity."
Miracle and beatification
Following Teresa's death in 1997, the Holy See began the process
of beatification, the first step towards possible canonization,
or sainthood. This process requires the documentation of a miracle.
In 2002, the Vatican recognized as a miracle the healing of a tumor
in the abdomen of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, following the application
of a locket containing Teresa's picture. Monica Besra said that
a beam of light emanated from the picture, curing the cancerous
tumor.
Besra's husband initially said that the tumor was cured by later
hospital treatment. According to Monica Besra in TIME Asia , records
of her treatment were removed by a member of the order from the
hospital and are now with a nun. The doctors who treated Monica
Besra denied the claims of a miracle healing and said that they
had come under pressure from the Missionaries of Charity to acknowledge
that the healing process was the result of a miracle.
Besra's husband later withdrew his objections and attributed the
healing to a miracle. A Telegraph story quoted him as saying: "It
was her miracle healing that cured my wife. Our situation was terrible
and we didn't know what to do. Now my children are being educated
with the help of the nuns and I have been able to buy a small piece
of land. Everything has changed for the better."
The issue of the alleged miracle proved controversial in India around
the time of Mother Teresa's beatification. Teresa was formally beatified
by Pope John Paul II on October 19, 2003, with the title Blessed
Teresa of Calcutta. A second authenticated miracle is required for
her to proceed to canonization.
Criticism
After
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's suspension of civil liberties
in 1975, Mother Teresa said: "People are happier. There are
more jobs. There are no strikes." These approving comments
were seen as a result of the friendship between Teresa and the Congress
Party. Mother Teresa's comments were even criticized outside India
within Catholic media. (Chatterjee, p. 276.)
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, produced
a critical British 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.
Mother Teresa had a short response to her critics: "No matter
who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own
work".
Stance on abortion
From the early 1970s, Mother Teresa began to attract some criticism.
Many advocates of the family planning and pro-choice movements were
critical of her views and influence because she was opposed to artificial
contraception and abortion. Mother Teresa frequently spoke against
them publicly and in meetings with high level government officials.
In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, she declared, "Abortion
is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace... Because if
a mother can kill her own child, what will prevent us from killing
ourselves or one another? Nothing."
In the aftermath of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, it was determined
that more than 450,000 Hindu women in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)
had been systematically raped. Even in this circumstances she asserted
her rejection of abortion by publicly renouncing abortion as an
option and by calling upon the women left behind to keep their unborn
children. She characterized her views later when asked in 1993 about
a 14 year old rape victim in Ireland, "Abortion can never be
necessary... because it is pure killing."
This stance is in line with that of the Roman Catholic Church, which
asserts Natural family planning is the only acceptable form of birth
control, even in cases where conception is the result of sexual
abuse or rape. She could be regarded a representative of this organisation.
Baptisms of the dying
Mother Teresa encouraged members of her order to baptize dying patients,
without regard to the individual's religion. In a speech at the
Scripps Clinic in California in January 1992, 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 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."
Critics have argued that patients were not provided sufficient information
to make an informed decision about whether they wanted to be baptized
and the theological significance of a Christian baptism.
Some of Mother Teresa's defenders have argued that baptisms are
either soul-saving or harmless and hence the criticisms would be
pointless (a variant of Pascal's Wager). Simon Leys, in a letter
to the New York Review of Books, wrote: "Either you believe
in the supernatural effect of this gesture--and then you should
dearly wish for it. Or you do not believe in it, and the gesture
is as innocent and well-meaningly innocuous as chasing a fly away
with a wave of the hand."
Questionable relationships
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.
Critics also cite the case of Charles Keating, who stole in excess
of US$252 million in the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s,
and who had donated $1.25 million to Mother Teresa's cause. Teresa
interceded on his behalf and wrote a letter to the court urging
leniency. The district attorney responded in private and asked her
to return the money, which she declined.
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 is no suggestion that she was
aware of any theft before accepting the donation in either case;
criticism instead focuses on Teresa's plea for leniency in the Keating
case, her refusal to return the money, and the lack of media investigations
of her relationships to these individuals.
Supporters of Mother Teresa see charges such as those above as clear
examples of double-standards and attempts of "guilt by association".
They allege that similar standards are not applied to other companies
and individuals who have had dealings with Maxwell and Keating,
and that the money collected went to use in helping the poor.
Motivation of charitable activities
Christopher Hitchens described Mother Teresa's organization 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."
Chatterjee added 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. According to a Stern
magazine report about Mother Teresa, the (Protestant) Assembly of
God charity serves 18,000 meals daily in Calcutta, many more than
all the Mission of Charity homes together.
Chatterjee alleged that many operations of the order engage in no
charitable activity at all but instead use their funds for missionary
work. He stated, 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.
Mother Teresa and her possible defenders apparently did not feel
a need to directly answer most of these allegations. Some defenders
of the order argue that missionary activity was the central part
of Teresa's calling.
Quality of medical care
In 1991, Dr. Robin Fox, editor of the British medical journal The
Lancet visited the Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta (now Kolkata)
and described the medical care the patients received as "haphazard."
He observed that sisters and volunteers, some of whom had no medical
knowledge, had to make decisions about patient care, because of
the lack of doctors in the hospice. Dr. Fox specifically held Teresa
responsible for conditions in this home, and observed that her order
did 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 Fox visited lacked strong analgesics
which he felt clearly separated Mother Teresa's approach from the
hospice movement. There have been a series of other reports documenting
inattention to medical care in the order's facilities. Similar points
of view have also been expressed by some former volunteers who worked
for Teresa's order. Mother Teresa herself referred to the facilities
as "Houses of the Dying."
In contrast to the conditions at her homes, Mother Theresa sought
medical treatment for herself at renowned medical clinics in the
United States, Europe, and India, drawing charges of hypocrisy from
critics such as Hitchens.
Destination of donations
It has been alleged by former employees of Mother Teresa's order
that Teresa refused to authorize the purchase of medical equipment,
and that donated money was instead transferred to the Vatican Bank
for general use, even if it was specifically earmarked for charitable
purposes. See Missionaries of Charity for a detailed discussion
of these allegations. Mother Teresa did not disclose her order's
financial situation except where she was required to do so by law.
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