The much darker side of Mother Teresa

Nicole Lampert, Weekend Mag (Daily Mail); Ashley Wells, Crystal Q. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Mother Teresa (left) with Princess Diana during visit to convent in Rome 2/19/92 (AFP/STR)

That's Teresa on the left with her sister Aga in old Albania (Corbis via Getty Images)

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Saint or sinner? A much darker side to Mother Teresa... 

US Pres. Ronald Reagan, Mother Teresa, Nancy

She was able to stop wars, befriend presidents, build a global [and profitable] empire of orphanages, and have sick prisoners released from prison. Yet, Mother Teresa also covered up for the worst excesses of the Catholic Church and seemed more attracted to poverty and pain than actually helping people escape it.

That's the claim in a compelling new three-part Sky documentary series Mother Teresa: For the Love of God, which talks to some of her closest friends and bitterest critics and serves as a thorough reappraisal of one of the most famous women of the last century.

She paid the Catholic Church

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Albania (now North Macedonia), in 1910, Mother Teresa's father died when she was 8 years old, plunging the family into poverty.

She took solace in the church and, aged 12, decided to become a Catholic nun. At 18 she went to Dublin to join the Catholic Sisters of Loreto Order, and a year later she moved to Calcutta, India (now Kolkata), to become a teacher.

Witnessing the misery and death caused by the Bengal famine of 1943 – when scores of dead bodies were left lying on the streets – had a profound impact on her, and three years later she claimed Jesus spoke to her on a train, giving her fresh instructions.

"I was to leave the convent and help the poor," she later wrote. "It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith."

The Church gave her permission to start her own order, the Missionaries of Charity, and she chose a new habit [dress], a simple white cotton sari with a bright blue border.

From the start, her compassion and charm were twinned with an irresistible steeliness. More

• Mother Teresa loved pain and told the nuns in her order to flagellate themselves with spikes...
• Saint or Sinner: New documentary claims to reveal Mother Teresa's dark truth (MSN)
• Criticism of the Missionaries of Charity

[By Wisdom Quarterly's own direct personal experience, as The Lancet's Robin Fox found, the Missionaries of Charity did little to preserve lives at Mother Teresa's center in Calcutta. They merely let the people die off the streets without much medical attention, diverting donations to the Vatican.

Perhaps the center we volunteered at is a hospice with no expectation or hope of arrivals recovering. Asking where these individuals were coming from, we were told police and others picked up drunks and vagrants on the streets of Kolkata.

This practice of not wasting money on the needy made Mother Teresa quite popular with Rome (the Holy Roman Empire's church headquarters) rather than saving the poorest of the poor, as she was thought to be doing with the money she collected.

Because of the conception of her in the popular imagination -- in spite of her being an atheist -- she was rushed to sainthood without a devil's advocate, a literal office that used to exist in the Catholic Church to vet their candidates for sainthood.]

Legacy under cloud as sainthood nears

(New Vision) As the Vatican prepares to declare Mother Teresa a "saint" this Sunday in the Indian city where she rose to fame, claims of medical negligence and financial mismanagement at her care homes threaten to cloud her legacy.

Pope Francis approved the canonization of the widely beloved Roman Catholic nun last December, nearly two decades after she died in Kolkata (Calcutta), in whose teeming slums she devoted her life to "helping" the destitute and the sick.

Yet criticisms of the soon-to-be Saint Teresa of Kolkata abound, with doctors and former volunteers recounting grim tales of poor sanitation, medical neglect and forced conversions of the dying...

But Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, MD, a British doctor born in the city formerly known as Calcutta, said that "her whole emphasis was propagation of her faith at any cost."

"To convert a dying, unconscious person is very, very low behaviour, very disgusting," the 58-year-old author of a controversial 2003 book on the nun said.

"Mother Teresa did that on an industrial basis." (New Vision)