Mother Teresa: A Biography (12 page)

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leaving thousands of patients with no place to go. Mother Teresa had lob-bied hard against the closing, but growing pressure from local residents and developers, who wanted the hospital moved away from the area, forced the city to shut down the facility. A new hospital for lepers was soon built further outside the city limits.

Mother Teresa, realizing that it would be difficult for the former patients of Gobra to go to the new facility, decided to open up her own clinic. Like the former Gobra facility, she found a site that was centrally located, which would make it easier for patients to receive treatment.

However, residents in the neighborhood, upon learning of the proposed clinic, did their best to stop her efforts. On one occasion, when she arrived in the neighborhood to inspect the site, she was met by angry neighborhood residents who began throwing stones at her. She took the angry response in stride and remarked that it appeared that God did not want the clinic in this area. She would pray for guidance.

As if in answer to her prayers, some American benefactors donated an ambulance to the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa hoped the vehicle would be the first of many mobile leprosy clinics. More help came from a Dr. Sen, a physician and specialist in the treatment of skin disease and leprosy. Sen had recently retired from the Carmichael Hospital for Tropical Diseases. Unsure of what to do with his free time and having heard of the works of the Missionaries of Charity, he offered his services. Mother Teresa gratefully accepted. Assisting Dr. Sen were three sisters who had received nurse’s training.

In September 1957, the first mobile leprosy clinic was launched. The ambulance could hold six persons along with a generous supply of medicine, food, and medical records. Traveling from slum to slum, and also making a stop outside the walls of the Loreto convent, the Missionaries of Charity sought out the city’s lepers. In time, eight treatment stations were established throughout Calcutta offering hope to the city’s 30,000 persons afflicted by leprosy. The bright blue vehicle soon became a recognized symbol of help and comfort. At each stop, the sisters handed out vitamins and medicine, along with packets of food. By January 1958, over 600 lepers regularly sought treatment from the mobile clinic.

A HIDEOUS DISEASE

In trying to help those afflicted by leprosy, Mother Teresa faced a special kind of problem. The disease, also known as Hansen’s disease, has been documented since biblical times. It is a particularly insidious ailment, striking people with little warning. The bacterium that causes lep-8 6

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rosy attacks the nervous system and destroys the body’s ability to feel pain.

Without pain, people injured themselves without always knowing it. Injuries become infected and resulted in tissue loss. Fingers and toes become shortened and deformed as the cartilage is absorbed into the body.

Early symptoms include discolored or light patches on the skin accompanied by loss of feeling. When the nerves are affected, small muscles become paralyzed, which leads to the curling of the fingers and thumb.

When leprosy attacks nerves in the legs, there is no sensation in the feet.

The feet can become subject to erosion through untended wounds and infection. If the facial nerves are affected, a person loses the blinking reflex of the eye, which can eventually lead to dryness, ulceration, and blind-ness. Bacilli entering the mucous lining of the nose can lead to internal damage and scarring, which in time causes the nose to collapse. The disease is assisted in its spread by unsanitary conditions, coughing, and sneez-ing. In a small household with poor sanitation, it is easy for the entire family to become infected.

The disease also carried with it, in India and elsewhere, a deep social stigma. The fear of becoming contaminated often prompts lepers to be banished. After the Gobra hospital closed, there was no place for many of the lepers in Calcutta to go except the slums and the countryside, where many died neglected. Even when a person recovered from the disease, they were still shunned by the community and often could not find housing, work, or help—the social stigma of the disease was that prevalent.

Although leprosy had all but disappeared in Europe and North America by the sixteenth century, it still existed in Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East. In 1873 Dr. Armauer Hansen of Norway discovered the bacteria that causes the disease, and a cure was almost a century away. During the 1950s, when Mother Teresa opened her first mobile clinics, leprosy was treated with dapsone pills. However, the leprosy bacilli began developing dapsone resistance hindering successful treatment.

TITLAGARH

For those stricken with leprosy, there was one place outside of Calcutta to go—Titlagarh, an industrial suburb located about an hour’s drive from Calcutta. Near the railway lines, a cluster of shanties had sprung up on either side. It was a village of the poor, with the lepers occupying the hovels alongside a swamp. The area was a human cesspool: there was no drainage or sewage, no drinking water, and no electricity. Even the wretchedly poor had nothing to do with the lepers. Townspeople and the S H I S H U B H AVA N A N D S H A N T I N A G A R

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police also stayed away for fear of infection. As a result, crime was ram-pant and indiscriminate; violence and murder were everyday happenings.

The lepers, because of their disease and poverty, could not seek out treatment; no doctor, clinic, or hospital in Titlagarh would see them.

In the meantime, even with the success of the mobile clinic, Mother Teresa and her sisters realized that there were still a number of patients from Titlagarh who could not afford the bus or train fare every week to seek help. Those who could often found themselves banned from riding.

In addition, Mother Teresa and the sisters were seeing more cases of newborns afflicted with leprosy; and it was a burden for mothers to come to the clinics. Many patients asked Mother Teresa to open a permanent clinic for them nearer to home.

When she made her first visit to Titlagarh, Mother Teresa realized that something needed to be done. Within a few months, she had established a small clinic in a shed near the railway lines. A few sisters were sent to handle the enormous caseload for the Titlagarh clinic. But it soon became evident that more needed to be done.

To draw attention to the plight of the lepers, Mother Teresa turned once again to her lay volunteers and benefactors. Many groups, hearing of the living conditions of the lepers, banded together to support a citywide collection to help them. The symbol used for the collection drive was a bell, the ancient symbol of the so-called unclean, but now pressed into service as a symbol of compassion. The slogan of the collection drive was Touch the Leper with Your Compassion; and the saying was carried on posters, signs, newspapers, and on the mobile van, too. The citywide campaign made it possible for even more lepers to be treated by uncovering other areas where groups of lepers resided.

Finally work was begun on the construction of a more permanent building. But that project ran into early difficulties. The first attempts to improve the living conditions of the railway site were met with opposition from gang leaders who ran most of the illegal activities in the area.

Stones greeted the volunteers who were cleaning up the site, but they persisted. Construction of two small cottages at last began, and with them, resistance to the construction faded. The gang leaders fled and many of the residents pitched in to help with the building. In addition to the clinic, which opened in March 1959, the facility housed a rehabilitation center, a hospital, and a cafeteria. An assortment of utility buildings was added during a 10-year period. By the time construction was finished in 1968, the buildings constituted a mile-long stretch. Mother Teresa asked the municipality of Titlagarh for water, sewers, and electricity for the area. Children were put into local schools, and slowly small shops 8 8

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and stalls appeared in the area where once only crime and violence had flourished.

But no sooner had the clinic opened than the municipal leaders feared an influx of lepers would come to Titlagarh. They begged Mother Teresa to consider opening yet another facility for lepers. With that in mind, Mother Teresa turned to her next project: Shantinagar.

SHANTINAGAR

In 1961, Mother Teresa received a gift from the Indian government: 34

acres of land located about 200 miles from Calcutta. She would pay the government an annual fee of one rupee a year for the land. The land was uncultivated, almost a jungle in appearance. With funds raised by German children singing at a charity concert, Mother Teresa began construction of Shantinagar—The Place of Peace for Lepers.

There was not enough money to complete the project. Hoping for a miracle, the Missionaries of Charity prayed for guidance. Their prayers were answered in 1965 in the form of a white 1964 Lincoln Continental automobile. The car was originally a present from American Catholics to Pope Paul VI. The pope had the car specially flown in for his state visit to India in 1964. While there, he visited Mother Teresa and the home at Nirmal Hriday and was so touched by the work of the Missionaries of Charity that he gave the car to Mother Teresa before he left. Having no practical use for the car, Mother Teresa raffled it off, raising a much larger sum of money than she would have by simple selling the automobile. In the end, the raffle netted the order of approximately 460,000 rupees or $100,000. With the funds raised by the raffle, Mother Teresa could pay for the main hospital block at Shantinagar.

In 1968, Mother Teresa sent Sister Francis Xavier along with several other sisters to Shantinagar to oversee the construction and maintenance of the grounds. Within the next two years, a number of key buildings went up including a rehabilitation center and cottage for lepers built by the patients themselves. In addition, flowering trees and shrubs, fruit trees, and vegetable gardens were planted on the grounds. The nearby pond was stocked with fish, all with an eye to promoting self-sufficiency among the residents.

In time, the home for lepers offered treatment and a chance at a normal life for almost 400 lepers and their families. New arrivals were taught to make bricks in order to construct new homes for future patients. The residents tended their own cattle, grew their own rice and wheat, and tilled their own gardens. Others ran a grocer’s shop. Some residents made S H I S H U B H AVA N A N D S H A N T I N A G A R

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baskets, which are used in the nearby coal mines. There is even a printing press. Shantinagar also has its own local government with its leaders elected from among the residents. Medical treatment is not far away, and with the advent of better drugs since the 1970s, many lepers had a chance to recover from their illness. There is also a Shishu Bhavan on the premises, where children can live and be protected from the more infectious patients.

With each new success and each new undertaking, it was becoming clear that Mother Teresa possessed extraordinary vision. She was making a name for herself, not only throughout Calcutta, but in India and beyond. Her great determination to help those who could not help themselves had earned her a host of supporters and a growing number of critics.

As the size and scale of the Missionaries of Charity grew, so did the seeds of controversy. By the end of the 1950s, it was clear that Mother Teresa and her order would no longer toil in anonymity.

NOTES

1. Mother Teresa with Jaya Chaliha and Edward Le Joly,
The Joy in Loving: A
Guide to Daily Living
(New York: Viking, 1996), p. 327.

2. Mother Teresa with Chaliha and Le Joly,
Joy,
p. 371.

Chapter 8

THE GROWTH OF A MIRACLE

By the late 1950s, Mother Teresa found herself becoming quite newsworthy, at least in Calcutta, where she was the subject of several articles in both the Indian and English newspapers. This attention marked the beginning of a remarkable relationship between Mother Teresa and the Indian press. For one thing, the articles about Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity often resulted in donations to the order. Some of the gifts came in the form of money; others donated supplies and their time.

The wife of a British businessman and a former Loreto student, Aruna Paul, helped teach children in the slums. She also organized Christmas parties for the children. After her own children were born, she made a point of having birthday parties for the children in Shishu Bhavan on the same day as her own children’s celebrations. She also made a point of taking her children with her to Shishu Bhavan to impress upon them how fortunate they were. Paul also had access to a textile factory; through her efforts, the sisters received new saris every year. Years later, Paul recalled that Mother Teresa, prior to her traveling, never seemed hurried and that she always had time for everyone who came to see her. But that would all soon change as Mother Teresa began capturing the attention of a much wider audience, while recognizing there were other places in the world that might benefit from her vision.

SETTING FOOT ON THE WORLD STAGE

For nearly 10 years, the work done by the Missionaries of Charity had been confined to Calcutta. This was in agreement with church law, which 9 2

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prohibited new orders to open houses outside of the diocese. Initially, Mother Teresa realized that between the archbishop’s emphatic enforce-ment of this rule, and the horrific problems she faced in Calcutta, expansion of any kind was clearly out of the question.

But, in 1959, things had changed. There was one year left before the probationary period of the Missionaries of Charity formally ended, and the sisters were eager to take their mission outside of Calcutta and begin work in other parts of India. When Mother Teresa went to Archbishop Périer, he relented. But he told Mother Teresa that her work could only expand into other areas of the country, not beyond. She agreed. New houses of the Missionaries of Charity were established—and warmly welcomed by church and city officials—in Delhi and Jhansi. The news of their work reached the highest echelons of Indian government; at the dedication of a children’s home in Delhi, the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, was in attendance. When introduced to him, Mother Teresa proceeded to tell the prime minister of her order. Gently stopping her, Nehru replied that he did not need to hear of her work; he knew all about it and that was why he had come to the ceremony. The Missionaries of Charity also sent a group of nuns to Ranchi, a city located in the extremely poor state of Bihar. Here, many girls from the local tribes were recruited to become Missionaries of Charity with great success.

In Bombay, a city with numerous Catholic churches and schools, the Missionaries of Charity were welcomed by none other than the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Bombay, Cardinal Valerian Gracias.

After a short tour of the city, Mother Teresa angered many of the residents with her comment that the slums of Bombay were worse than those in Calcutta. But many others recognized that beside the many palatial homes found in the city were also tall buildings with little ventilation, no indoor plumbing, and very little fresh air. With Cardinal Gracias’s blessing, Mother Teresa soon opened a home for the dying, similar to Nirmal Hriday.

In the autumn of 1960, Mother Teresa looked beyond the borders of her adopted country and accepted an invitation to speak at the National Council for Catholic Women to be held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Although it seemed an unlikely destination for a woman considered a saint throughout India, Mother Teresa went with the hope of raising more funds for the Missionaries of Charity.

By this time, Mother Teresa was 50 years old and in charge of 119 nuns, all but three of whom were Indian, and she wished to carry her message further. As it turned out, her reputation was already becoming established on the world stage. In the United States, she had appeared on the front T H E G R OW T H O F A M I R A C L E

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page of an American magazine called
Jubilee: A Magazine for the Church
and Her People
in 1958, which introduced her at least to the American Catholic community.

That October, Mother Teresa arrived in Los Angeles; from there she traveled to Las Vegas in the company of a former volunteer with the Missionaries of Charity, Katherine Bracken. Mother Teresa was to give a speech entitled “These Works of Love,” in which she outlined the work of the Missionaries of Charity.

Mother Teresa had never spoken in public before; previously she had relied on others to do her talking for her. But speaking before 3,000

women, she discovered that what might have been a disadvantage actually was an advantage. Instead of a professional giving a polished speech, Mother Teresa showed herself to be a natural orator. She spoke easily of her life’s work and that of the Missionaries of Charity in India. She stated she was not there to beg for donations; instead she continued to rely on God’s providence for help. But she did remind her audience that they, too, could participate in doing something beautiful for God. As she was to discover, this approach proved far more effective in raising money than a direct appeal ever would. Afterwards, sitting in a booth in the convention hall, she watched as person after person stopped to put cash in a bag she carried with her. During the course of the day, the bag was emptied several times. Mother Teresa had discovered a powerful and successful way in which to raise funds for her projects. It was a formula from which she rarely deviated in the following years.

During her time in Las Vegas, Mother Teresa was less interested in the goings-on in the nearby casinos and nightclubs than she was to traveling in the desert. When asked what she thought of the city, she replied that the neon lights of the city’s casinos and hotels reminded her of Dewali, the yearly Hindu festival of lights. As a souvenir of her visit to Nevada, she took some long cactus spines that she found in the desert. These were later twisted into a crown of thorns and placed on the head of the crucified Christ hanging behind the altar in the novitiate chapel of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta.

A WHIRLWIND TOUR

From Las Vegas, Mother Teresa went to Peoria, Illinois, where she spoke to yet another group of Catholic women. Then it was on to Chicago and New York City. In each city, she was welcomed warmly and had little trouble in gathering more monies for the Missionaries of Charity. One disappointment in her itinerary came when a planned meeting with the 9 4

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Democratic presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy, who was also Roman Catholic, did not take place. However, while in New York City, Mother Teresa met with Mother Anna Dengel, the Austrian-born founder of the Medical Mission Sisters, who had given Mother Teresa her early medical training in Patna a little more than a decade earlier. She also paid visits to Catholic Relief Services, and met with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who was a prominent radio and television personality in the United States. Sheen was the head of the American division of the foreign mission’s organization, the Propagation of the Faith, which channeled donations to Catholic missions all over the world. But perhaps one of the most important contacts Mother Teresa made during this trip was with Marcolino Candau, director of the World Health Organization (WHO). She told Candau of her urgent need to provide for the lepers and their children in India. Candau told her that if she made her request through the Indian government, WHO would see that she received the necessary medical supplies.

From New York, Mother Teresa’s next stop was London, where she spent one evening at the home of the sister of Indian Prime Minister Nehru, who encouraged her to expand her work, particularly where volunteers were concerned. Mother Teresa also met with a representative of the Oxfam aid agency and had her first television interview with a British journalist on the BBC.

Her next stop was Germany, where Mother Teresa enjoyed a greater reputation, having been featured in a news magazine
Weltelend
(
World
Misery
), published by the German Catholic relief agency Miseror. The article had also shown photos of the terrible poverty in Calcutta as well as shots of Nirmal Hriday. Another news magazine
Erdkreis
(
Earth Circle
) had featured photos of Kalighat. As she stepped off the plane, wrapped in a rough wool blanket to protect her from the cold weather, Mother Teresa was greeted by a horde of German photographers and journalists.

In meeting with Miseror representatives, Mother Teresa outlined her plans for the construction of a new home for the dying in Delhi. She already had land set aside, but needed help in building the proposed facility.

The organization, while generally preferring to fund self-help projects, readily agreed to her request. In return, they asked only that the Missionaries of Charity send financial statements to the organization to monitor how the money was spent. To their great surprise, Mother Teresa flatly rejected their request, stating that the sisters did not have time to spend on preparing complicated financial forms. She assured the officials that they should not worry about the money; each penny would go to the proposed project. But her refusal to keep detailed accounts marked the beginning of T H E G R OW T H O F A M I R A C L E

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a practice that would continue and later become a source of much criticism. As Mother Teresa later argued, making out separate reports to each sponsor would be so time-consuming that the poor would suffer. Although she and her sisters recorded each donation with a letter, they did not keep detailed financial records of donations accepted and monies spent. As was her nature, Mother Teresa ignored complaints about the order’s account-ing practices.

Before leaving Germany, Mother Teresa also stopped to visit Dachau, one of the most infamous concentration camps in Nazi Germany, where more than 28,000 Jews died between 1933 and 1945. After listening to the history of the camp, Mother Teresa stated that the camp was to history what the Colosseum in Rome was to the Romans who threw the Christians to their death. In Mother Teresa’s eyes, modern humans were behaving no better, and if anything, far worse.

After a brief visit to Switzerland, Mother Teresa stopped in Rome where she hoped to make a formal and personal plea to Pope John XXIII for the Missionaries of Charity to become a Society of Pontifical Right. If the pope agreed, it would mean that the Missionaries of Charity could begin working in other countries. However, when it came time to meet the pope, Mother Teresa, frightened at making the request directly to the pope, instead only asked for his blessing. She then made her request to Cardinal Gregory Agagianian, who agreed to take the matter under consideration. But it was clear that the Church recognized the value and importance of Mother Teresa not only to its missionary and humanitarian efforts, but to its efforts to spread the Gospel.

A BRIEF REUNION

While in Rome, Mother Teresa arranged a reunion with her brother Lazar, whom she had not seen in more than 30 years. Lazar now lived in Palermo, Sicily, where he worked for a pharmaceutical firm. He was also married to an Italian woman and was the father of a 10-year-old daughter.

During World War II, he had joined the Italian army after the Italian occupation of Albania. His defection to the Italian army earned him a death sentence in Albania; Lazar could never return to the land of his birth.

When the two met, they discussed the terrible predicament of Aga and their mother, who were still in Albania. The country, now a communist satellite of the Soviet Union, had made it virtually impossible for its residents to leave Albania. Mother Teresa had applied for a visa to visit the country, and possibly because of her brother, but more likely because of her own activities, she had been refused. Albania’s atheist government 9 6

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did not look kindly on a religious figure, particularly one becoming internationally renowned.

And then all too soon, it was time to return home. Upon her arrival in Calcutta, Mother Teresa continued to work with her sisters, opening up new homes throughout India. For the next five years, new chapters appeared in cities and states throughout the country. Adopting the pattern established in Calcutta, the Missionaries of Charity assessed the needs of an area and adapted their programs. With each new house, each new school, each new mobile clinic, Mother Teresa’s name and works gained greater and greater recognition. Still, it was not enough, and Mother Teresa waited anxiously for news from the Vatican.

THE BIGGEST MIRACLE OF ALL

In February 1965, Mother Teresa finally received her answer: the Missionaries of Charity had received the pope’s permission to become a Society of Pontifical Right. In his decree granting the right, Pope Paul VI, who had succeeded John XXIII, charged Mother Teresa and her order to continue carrying out their works of charity and to dedicate themselves to God. Now, Mother Teresa could carry her good works outside of India for the first time. In time, these works included clinics for those suffering from tuberculosis; antenatal clinics; clinics for general medical needs; mobile leprosy clinics; night shelters for the homeless; homes for children, the poor, and the dying; nursery schools, primary, and secondary schools; feeding programs; villages for lepers; commercial schools; voca-tional training in carpentry, metal work, embroidery and other skills; child-care and home-management classes; and aid in the event of emergencies and disasters such as floods, earthquakes, famine, epidemics, rioting and war.

Mother Teresa’s first invitation came in 1965 when she was asked to open a house in Venezuela, to help many of the impoverished people who had lapsed in their Catholicism due to a lack of priests and nuns to sustain them. Archbishop James Robert Knox, the Internuncio to New Delhi, had already met with a South American bishop who impressed upon Knox the need for the Missionaries of Charity. Knox wanted Mother Teresa to accept the invitation and pressed her to do so. But Mother Teresa balked. She was not sure that her sisters were ready for such an undertaking. She wanted more time. Archbishop Knox told her that the needs of the Church were more important than the needs of her sisters.