Criticisms of Mother Teresa

Until the 1990s, the activities of Mother Teresa (Agnes Bojaxhiu) were treated in the mass media with relatively little criticism. This tendency in reporting is generally believed to be the result of a trend started by BBC reporter Malcolm Muggeridge, who portrayed Bojaxhiu as a modern day saint in his TV documentary Something Beautiful for God and best-selling book of the same title. The strongest attack against her came in 1994, when Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali wrote the scathing Channel 4 documentary Hell's Angel. The next year, Hitchens published The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, a 100-page pamphlet which repeats many of the accusations in the documentary.

Hitchens views Teresa's organization as a cult which promotes suffering and does not help those in need. He states that the impression the general public has about Mother Teresa's work is the opposite of reality, and that this is more the fault of the mass media than of Teresa herself. In his view, the idea that someone, somewhere is helping the poor of the world appealed to western viewers and quieted their conscience.

Hitchens cites Teresa's own words on poverty as evidence that her intention was never to help people. In a 1981 press conference concerning the establishment of a Missionaries of Charity operation in Anacostia, a predominantly black and poor suburb of Washington, DC, she responded to an invasion of black men who wanted Teresa out of Anacostia because they did not feel her presence would in any way help their community. The following dialogue with a reporter developed:

"Mother Teresa, what do you hope to accomplish here?"

"The joy of loving and being loved."

"That takes a lot of money, doesn't it?"

"It takes a lot of sacrifice."

"Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?"

"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."

Hitchens states that Teresa was always perfectly honest that her goal was not to heal people, but to help them in their endurance of suffering, which Teresa, as above, often compared to the suffering of Jesus Christ. A more moderate and more scholarly analysis was published in 2002 by Aroup Chatterjee, a writer born in Calcutta and living in England who briefly worked for one of Mother Teresa's homes. The 425 page book "The Final Verdict" is probably the most comprehensive critical analysis of Mother Teresa's life and work to date.

Insufficient medical care

One major point of contention by all critics is the actual situation in Mother Teresa's facilities. Hitchens cites Dr. Robin Fox, then editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, who visited the Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta. He wrote about this visit in the September 17, 1994 issue of the journal. A less selective quote than the one provided by Hitchens follows:

What sort of medical care do they get? It is haphazard. There are doctors who call in from time to time but usually the sisters and volunteers (some of whom have medical knowledge) make decisions as best they can. I saw a young man who had been admitted in poor shape with high fever, and the drugs prescribed had been tetracycline and parcetamol. Later, a visiting doctor diagnosed probable malaria and substituted chloroquine. Could not someone have looked at a blood film? Investigations, I was told, are seldom permissible. How about simple algorithms that might help the sisters and volunteers distinguish the curable from the incurable? Again no. Such systematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home. Mother Theresa prefers providence to planning; her rules are designed to prevent any drift towards materialism; the sisters must remain on equal terms with the poor. So the most important features of the regimen are cleanliness, the tending of wounds and sores, and loving kindness. (One requirement is that all prescriptions be written in pencil, and subsequently rubbed out, to allow re-use of the paper.) If you give money to Mother Theresa's home, don't expect it to be spent on some little luxury.

Finally, how competent are the sisters at managing pain? On a short visit I could not judge the power of their spiritual approach, but I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics. Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Theresa's approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement. I know which I prefer. (source text, includes responses)

Hitchens also cites a report by one Mary Louden, who had spent time as a volunteer worker in one of the mission's homes. The first report by Louden appeared in the May 3, 1992 issue of The Guardian:

When I was in Calcutta, I went to work at the most famous of Mother Teresa's monuments to human dignity: the home for the dying at Kalighat. Because I had already been working in the city for some time, I naively imagined myself to be immune to shock. How wrong I was. The home at Kalighat consists of two rooms, each with around 40 patients in stretcher beds, sandwiched between pieces of green plastic and small, scratchy blankets. On admission, the patients' heads are shaved, their clothes removed, and any possessions confiscated. Patients wear a knee-length western-style overall that ties at the neck and gapes open at the back. No underwear is provided.

There is nothing for the patients to do, and nowhere for them to go...The fact that the food is nutritionally inadequate and always the same, the water disease ridden, and the volunteers largely unable to speak Bengali is of little importance...

I don't know if she [a dying woman with TB] had any family. If she did, they would almost certainly not have been allowed to see her, because families are strongly discouraged from visiting their relatives at the home. What I do know, or at least I was told, by an American doctor working at Kalighat, was that she might have lived if she had received some hospital treatment. Yet Mother Teresa's policy is not one of intervention...God decides who lives and who dies. People are better off in heaven than in the operating theatre. Thus, instead of using her influence and income to finance a properly equipped hospital, Mother Teresa and her Sisters continue to give aspirin to patients with cancer, linctus to those with TB, and glucose drips with old needles rinsed in cold water to those in comas. And everyone, regardless of creed, gets a good Catholic funeral.

In Hell's Angel, Louden stated:

My initial impression [of the Home] was of pictures and footage of places like Belsen that I had seen. The patients' heads are shaved, and they lie in first world war stretcher beds. There is no garden, there is no yard - there is nothing for the patients to do, nowhere for them to go, they can't even sit,...there are no chairs, there's nothing... The only painkillers used were aspirin, and, if you were lucky, some Brufen...

Once I asked a nun who was washing used needles under a cold water tap why she wasn't sterilising them - she said there's no point...My boyfriend worked in the men's room and he was looking after a young boy who had some kind of problem - I forget exactly what - which an American doctor volunteer told me was entirely treatable. I asked the nuns why they were not taking him to the hospital, why they weren't doing something as simple as calling a cab and taking him to the hospital, but they said that was not how they worked - 'If we do it for one we have to do it for everybody'...

Susan Shields, who says that she was employed by a Missionaries of Charity facility in the Bronx and remained in the order for nine and a half years until she left in May 1989 published an article in Free Inquiry Magazine. In it, she wrote:

Mother was very concerned that we preserve our spirit of poverty. Spending money would destroy that poverty. She seemed obsessed with using only the simplest of means for our work. Was this in the best interests of the people we were trying to help, or were we in fact using them as a tool to advance our own "sanctity?" In Haiti, to keep the spirit of poverty, the sisters reused needles until they became blunt. Seeing the pain caused by the blunt needles, some of the volunteers offered to procure more needles, but the sisters refused.

Chatterjee cites Australian Catholic nurse Tracey Leonard, who wrote in her 1990 book "The Full Catastrophe" about operations run by the Missionaries of Charity:

Unfortunately Jesus is not the one giving out the medication or administering injections to the patients. He, I would trust to get it right but his helpers have a lackadaisical approach to matters medical. I have seen them give the steroid Prednisolone instead of paracetamol, because both start with the letter 'p'. Whenever I yell at them and accuse them of murdering the patients they simply smile and tell me that it is all in God's hands.

Even the level of psychological care is contended. Hitchens cites Elgy Gillespie, an author and journalist who worked in a San Francisco home for AIDS patients called "The Gift of Love" (Mother Teresa sometimes expressed sentiments that AIDS was punishment by God for improper sexual conduct). Gillespie states that most of the people there who were not too sick to care were depressed, because they could neither drink nor watch television nor invite friends.

Guilt by association

File:MotherTeresa-MicheleDuvalier.jpg
Mother Teresa with the wife of "Baby Doc" Jean-Claude Duvalier, Michèle Duvalier; photo published in Duvalier's propaganda newspaper L'Assaut, January 1981. Teresa praised the wife of the notorious dictator: "I have never seen the poor people being so familiar with their heads of state as they were with her."

Hitchens has charged Teresa with association with dictators and questionable figures, in particular the regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti, in order to expand her mission. Teresa posed with Duvalier's wife and applauded her politics. Teresa also accepted a donation of over one million dollars from convicted Savings and Loan swindler Charles Keating, and later sent a plea for clemency to Keating's trial judge. In response, the Deputy District Attorney Paul Turley, responsible for Keating's case, wrote a letter as a private citizen back to Mrs. Bojaxhiu, stating that the money was stolen from hundreds of people, many of them "people of modest means and unfamiliar with high finance" who had their life savings stolen by Keating. He asked Mother Teresa to return the money, to no avail.

Improper and undisclosed use of funds

One major criticism is that the Missionaries of Charity do not disclose their use of funds, and do not use the funds to support their charitable activites. In her Free Inquiry article, Susan Shields noted:

As a Missionary of Charity, I was assigned to record donations and write the thank-you letters. The money arrived at a frantic rate. The mail carrier often delivered the letters in sacks. We wrote receipts for checks of $50,000 and more on a regular basis. Sometimes a donor would call up and ask if we had received his check, expecting us to remember it readily because it was so large. How could we say that we could not recall it because we had received so many that were even larger?

When Mother spoke publicly, she never asked for money, but she did encourage people to make sacrifices for the poor, to "give until it hurts." Many people did - and they gave it to her. We received touching letters from people, sometimes apparently poor themselves, who were making sacrifices to send us a little money for the starving people in Africa, the flood victims in Bangladesh, or the poor children in India. Most of the money sat in our bank accounts.

...

The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives and very little effect on the lives of the poor we were trying to help. We lived a simple life, bare of all superfluities. We had three sets of clothes, which we mended until the material was too rotten to patch anymore. We washed our own clothes by hand. The never-ending piles of sheets and towels from our night shelter for the homeless we washed by hand, too. Our bathing was accomplished with only one bucket of water. Dental and medical checkups were seen as an unnecessary luxury.

The most extensive analysis of the order's financials was published in 1998 by the Stern German weekly. The article again cited Shields:

Values were between $5 and $100,000. Donors often dropped their envelopes filled with money at the door. Before Christmas the flow of donations was often totally out of control. The postman brought sackfuls of letters -- cheques for $50,000 were no rarity." [Shields] remebers that one year there was about $50 million in a New York bank account. $50 million in one year, in a predominantly non-Catholic country. How much then, were they collecting in Europe or the world? It is estimated that worldwide they collected at least $100 million per year.

The article reported that the financial records of the order are treated with much secrecy. According to the author, it is unknown what happens with the money:

England is one of the few countries where the sisters allow the authorities at least a quick glance at their accounts. Here the order took in DM 5.3 million [about 2.6 million dollars] in 1991. And expenses (including charitable expenses)? -- around DM 360,000 [about 180,000 dollars] or less than 7%. Whatever happened to the rest of the money? Sister Teresina, the head for England, defensively states, "Sorry we cannot tell you that." Every year, according to the returns filed with the British authorities, a portion of the fortune is sent to accounts of the order in other countries. How much to which countries is not declared. One of the recipients is, however, always Rome. The fortune of this famous charitable organistaion is controlled from Rome -- from an account at the Vatican Bank. And what happens with money at the Vatican Bank is so secret that even God is not allowed to know about it. One thing is sure however -- Mother's outlets in poor countries do not benefit from largesse of the rich countries. The official biographer of Mother Teresa, Kathryn Spink, writes, "As soon as the sisters became established in a certain country, Mother normally withdrew all financial support." Branches in very needy countries therefore only receive start-up assistance. Most of the money remains in the Vatican Bank.

File:MotherTeresa-CharlesKeating.jpg

Mother Teresa with Charles Keating, convicted of fraud in the Savings and Loan scandal and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Mother Teresa received over a million dollars in donations from him, which she did not return after the conviction. She did, however, send a plea for clemency to Keating's trial judge.

Stern asked the Missionaries of Charity numerous times for information about location of the donations, both in writing as well in person during a visit to Mother Teresa's house in Calcutta. The order has never answered.

"You should visit the House in New York, then you'll understand what happens to donations," says Eva Kolodziej. The Polish lady was a Missionary of Charity for 5 years. "In the cellar of the homeless shelter there are valuable books, jewellery and gold. What happens to them? -- The sisters receive them with smiles, and keep them. Most of these lie around uselessly forever."

The millions that are donated to the order have a similar fate. Susan Shields (formerly Sr. Virginia) says, "The money was not misused, but the largest part of it wasn't used at all. When there was a famine in Ethiopia, many cheques arrived marked 'for the hungry in Ethiopia'. Once I asked the sister who was in charge of accounts if I should add up all those very many cheques and send the total to Ethiopia. The sister answered, 'No, we don't send money to Africa.' But I continued to make receipts to the donors, 'For Ethiopia'.

Secret baptisms

Susan Shields has also stated that the organization frequently engages in baptisms of the people it helps. In Hitchens' book she is quoted as follows:

In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a 'ticket to heaven'. A affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend that she was just cooling the person's forehead with a wet cloth, while she was in fact baptising him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa's order was secretly baptising Hindus and Moslems.

Aroup Chatterjee adds in The Final Verdict:

I feel that despite her inner urge, Mother would not have risked the above practice in Calcutta or anywhere in India (Mrs. Shields did not work in India). Because Indian Hindus, who may be supremely oblivious to the suffering of their poor or to the calumny of Calcutta by an Albanian nun, would embark on bloodbath if such a practice ever came to light.

Although Mother herself had once made a similar admission. On 14 January 1992, after her heart surgery at Scripps Clinic, California, she made a lengthy speech to doctors and nurses (captured on video which has been widely publicly distributed and available) in which she gloated about secretive conversions:

'Something very beautiful...not one has died without receiving the special ticket for St Peter we call it. We call baptism ticket for St Peter. We ask the [dying] 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.'

Missionary activity and extent of charitable activities

Aroup Chatterjee has criticized at length that many operations of the order engage in no charitable activity at all but instead use their funds to convert native tribes to Christianity:

None of the eight 'homes' that the Missionaries of Charity run in Papua New Guinea has got a single resident in it. Because they are nunneries. But why put nunneries in this remote corner of the world? Because they are recruitment centres for local women who would opt to become Catholic nuns; these nunneries would also point men in the direction of the nearest Catholic church should they become 'hungry for Christ', one of Mother's favourite expressions.

The order's main nunnery in the country, in capital Port Moresby, until a few years back, used to have a shelter for battered women and their children. This shelter, which was on the ground floor of the convent, has now been scrapped - to make room for the 'candidates', as they are called. These 'candidates' are local girls who have decided, for whatever reason, to become Catholic nuns. They remain 'candidates' for one year at Port Moresby, following which they are shipped to the Philippines to officially become novices.

...

The other, and most important, function these 'active' nuns perform is to teach the catechism to the locals, especially children.

These claims are generally not disputed, however, defenders of Teresa see missionary activity as part of Teresa's calling and do not find it problematic. Chatterjee and other critics counter that the public media image of Mother Teresa as a "helper of the poor" is misleading, and that only a few hundred people are served by even the largest of the homes. The Stern article noted that the Assembly of God charity alone serves 18,000 meals daily in Calcutta, orders of magnitude more than Teresa's homes. Yet Teresa's activities have received far more attention.

Abuse of patients

Mother Teresa is also held responsible by critics for the conditions of care in her stations. Chatterjee cites "one Kalighat priest, Debi Charan Haldar, who lived and worked close to the home" and who gave an interview in the December 1990 issue of Calcutta Skyline:

But many Sisters belonging to the Missionaries of Charity are very harsh towards the patients at Nirmal Hriday. Almost every night we hear heartrending cries from these old patients. I suspect the Sisters indulge in physical torture.

In September 2000, Teresa's successor Sister Nirmala admitted that one nun working in a Calcutta shelter run by the Missionaries had tortured four young street children with a hot knife. According to Nirmala, the children had tried to steal money. [1], [2]

Activity against contraception and abortion

Many proponents of abortion and contraception have criticized Mother Teresa's stance on these matters as irresponsible. Her opposition to contraception, which reflects Catholic dogma, was viewed as particularly dangerous to countries in which overpopulation contributes to massive public health problems. Bojaxhiu's answers to these problems like "God will provide" were regarded as unhelpful platitudes. Mother Teresa's position on these questions is in line with the official position of the Roman Catholic Church, however, and her detractors primarily criticize her for it because she so effectively carried it to millions of people.