Mother Teresa: A Biography (17 page)

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complained, though, that officials of the British government did little to ease the suffering of homeless in their country, despite her offers of help.

Although the last 20 years had brought great recognition for Mother Teresa and her organization, it was also a period of loss, regret, and controversy. With a new decade looming before her, Mother Teresa, at the age of 80, showed no signs of slowing down. However, the coming years would be less than kind to her, both personally and professionally, as she strove to continue her work with the poor.

NOTES

1. Kathryn Spink,
Mother Teresa
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1997), p. 102.

2. Germaine Greer, “Heroes and Villains,”
Independent,
September 22, 1990.

3. Raghu Rai and Navin Chawla,
Mother Teresa: Faith and Compassion
(Rockport, Mass.: Element, 1992), p. 184; Anne Sebba,
Mother Teresa: Beyond the Image
(New York: Doubleday, 1997), p. 100.

4. Eileen Egan,
Such a Vision of the Street: Mother Teresa
—
The Spirit and the
Work
(Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1986), p. 396.

5. Egan,
Vision,
p. 398.

6. “The Week,”
National Review,
January 4, 1980, p. 12.

7. Nobel Foundation, “Mother Teresa Nobel Lecture,” http://www.nobel.se/

peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html (accessed November 19, 2003).

8. Nobel Foundation, “Mother Teresa Nobel Lecture,” http://www.nobel.se/

peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html (accessed November 19, 2003).

9. Anthony Burgess, “Mother Teresa,”
Evening Standard,
January 3, 1992.

Chapter 10

“THE MOST OBEDIENT

WOMAN IN THE CHURCH”

Even though Mother Teresa kept up her busy schedule, it was clear by the early 1990s that traveling from place to place, visiting many of the world’s most troubled spots, could not last forever. Beginning in 1989, her health began deteriorating. In September of that year, she suffered a near-fatal heart attack and underwent major surgery. The heart trouble was not new; she had first been diagnosed with it almost 15 years earlier. Still, she continued her frenetic pace.

After being fitted with a pacemaker in December 1989, Mother Teresa traveled to establish new homes for the Missionaries of Charity. But in 1991, she was hospitalized again, this time at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California, where she was treated for heart disease and bacterial pneumonia. Later, she took ill while visiting in Ti-juana, Mexico, and doctors were forced to perform surgery to open a blood vessel.

Although increasingly frail, Mother Teresa did not slow down. Then, in 1993, while in Rome, she fell and broke her ribs. That July, she was hospitalized for two days in Bombay for exhaustion; not more than a month later, she was back in the hospital in New Delhi, this time for a malarial infection, which was further complicated by heart and lung problems. She was transferred to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where she recuperated in the intensive-care coronary unit. She was home in Calcutta for less than a month, when she was treated by doctors yet again, this time for a blocked heart vessel. Clearly, age and the years of deprivation, travel, and work were taking their toll on Mother Teresa’s health.

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UNWILLING TO LET GO

By 1990, given her ill health, Mother Teresa began giving serious thought to stepping down as head of the Missionaries of Charity. She even went as far as to inform Pope John Paul II of her intentions. Yet, she did nothing. Some people believed that Mother Teresa did not wish to relin-quish control of the order she had founded. Others thought that she feared a sudden drop in donations if she stepped down. Therefore, it was crucial to the survival of the order and their mission that she remain at the helm.

Even among her supporters, Mother Teresa’s refusal to appoint a successor was troubling. For many, building up what had become a major institution with a tremendous amount of goodwill and money, but not looking ahead to the future seemed short-sighted and egocentric. Church leaders were also concerned; clearly, it was time for a younger, more vig-orous leader to take over the order. Mother Teresa’s supporters also feared that the great goodwill she had built up would somehow be negated by her ill health. One supporter, working in the Vatican, also believed that, even if she stepped down, Mother Teresa would still stay involved in the order.

She could concentrate on things such as the daily administration and education, which did not require the exhaustive traveling that she did. For the time being, Mother Teresa would not consider even a partial retire-ment.

Thus, despite her ill health, Mother Teresa continued to respond to new crises around the world. She also continued to receive large financial donations from world leaders. For instance, Yassir Arafat, head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, presented her personally with a $50,000 check in Calcutta, though he never commented on why he made such a generous donation to the Missionaries of Charity.

The last three decades had for the most part been very kind to Mother Teresa. She enjoyed public acclaim and was handled gently by the media.

But the attitudes changed in the 1990s. Signaling the perceptible shift was the publication of Germaine Greer’s article about Mother Teresa’s efforts in Bangladesh almost 20 years earlier. There was also trouble when it was announced that a movie of Mother Teresa’s life was being planned.

Slated to play her was British actress Glenda Jackson and the script was being written by Dominique LaPierre, who had written the best-selling book
City of Joy,
which described working with Missionaries of Charity.

The proposed film even had the Vatican’s support; yet Mother Teresa declined to cooperate with the film project and never explained her decision. Newspaper and magazine profiles of her were now often less

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flattering, portraying her as demanding and egotistical. This was only portent of what lay ahead.

HELL’S ANGEL

On November 8, 1994, the switchboard operator at the British television station Channel Four was bombarded by over 200 calls. Many of the callers were irate viewers who had just finished watching a half-hour film called
Hell’s Angel,
produced by Pakistani-born Tariq Ali, a noted and controversial author and broadcaster. The angel was Mother Teresa, and the tempest surrounding the film, already generating controversy in pre-views, showed no sign of cooling down soon.

The film, which featured journalist Christopher Hitchens, made some accusations, many of which had been noted earlier by the British-born Hitchens in his writings for such well-known publications as
Vanity Fair
and the ultraliberal news magazine
Nation.
Among the many inflamma-tory statements Hitchens made was that “Mother Teresa has an easy way with thrones, dominions and powers,” and operated “as the roving ambas-sador of [the] highly politicized papacy”1 of Pope John Paul II. In addition, Hitchens charged that Mother Teresa

lends spiritual solace to dictators and to wealthy exploiters, which is scarcely the essence of simplicity, and she preaches surrender and prostration to the poor, which a truly humble person would barely have the nerve to do. . . . In a godless and cynical age it may be inevitable that people will seek to praise the self-effacing, the altruistic and the pure in heart. But only a complete collapse of our critical faculties can explain the illusion that such a person is manifested in the shape of a dema-gogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers.2

The source of the film was actually Dr. Aroup Chatterjee, a Bengali physician living in London. Dr. Chatterjee, who was born and raised in Calcutta, was dismayed at the discrepancy between Mother Teresa’s work and the growing cult-like adulation of her in the West. In a letter written to the production company Bandung, Dr. Chatterjee also stated that Mother Teresa’s assets totaled more than those of many Third-World govern-ments; and that in Calcutta, unlike the West, she was regarded as something of a nonentity. Chatterjee’s greatest objection, though, was in how closely intertwined Mother Teresa’s work and identity were with Calcutta, another misconception on the part of the West. Chatterjee pointed 1 2 6

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out that there were a number of other individuals and groups doing far more for the city’s poor than the Missionaries of Charity, and these groups were completely overlooked.

The production company was more than willing to listen to Chatterjee’s proposal. The company had already, in its short existence, voiced some of the very same grievances that Chatterjee had described. Calcut-tans were annoyed that Western journalists and filmmakers portrayed their city as a place that cared little for the poor, the sick, and the dying.

In the 1991 film
City of Joy,
for example, Calcutta was depicted as little more than a dark pit of misery and despair.

The decision to interview Hitchens might at first have seemed odd.

But, in fact, he was already quite familiar with Mother Teresa, having first met her in 1980. In a 1992 article called the “Ghoul of Calcutta,”

Hitchens described his first encounter with Mother Teresa, whom he described as the “leathery old saint.” He had stopped at the Missionaries of Charity facility on Bose Road and was immediately put off by the home’s motto “He That Loveth Correction Loveth Knowledge.” Despite his reaction, Hitchens agreed to go along on a walk with Mother Teresa. Initially, he was favorably impressed:

I was about to mutter some words of praise for the nurses and was even fumbling in my pocket when Mother Teresa announced: “You see, this is how we fight abortion and contraception in Calcutta.” Mother Teresa’s avowed motive somewhat cheapened the ostensible work of the charity and made it appear rather more like what it actually is: an exercise in propaganda.3

As harsh as that initial assessment was, Hitchens had an opportunity in the film to voice even more accusations. Against footage of Mother Teresa that showed her bent and looking down, Hitchens described her connection with the deposed Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, from whom she accepted large financial donations. Footage was also shown of her laying a wreath at the grave of Enver Hoxha, the ruthless communist dictator of Albania, and meeting with notorious figures in the business world. According to Hitchens, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity grossed an annual income in the neighborhood of tens of millions of dollars.

Hitchens also suggested, as had some of Mother Teresa’s other critics, that if the monies accumulated by the order were kept in Calcutta,

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chances are the order would certainly make much more of a difference in working with the poor. Instead, Mother Teresa spread her nuns and their money very thinly trying to open homes throughout the world. Further, Hitchens argued, Mother Teresa chose her convent and the church’s teachings over the work of her clinics.

According to the BBC, the Channel Four program did spectacularly: approximately 1.6 million viewers tuned in to watch. In the aftermath of the documentary’s airing, callers phoning the station called the program insulting, hurtful, offensive, obscene, untrue, obnoxious, shocking, and satanic. One viewer even went so far as to accuse the head of the station, Michael Grade, a Jew, of anti-Catholic bias, while both Hitchens and Tariq Ali were branded as Bolsheviks and Marxist revolutionaries. Other viewers believe the film was nothing less than the work of a Judeo-Muslim conspiracy.

The Roman Catholic Church understandably rallied to Mother Teresa’s defense, denouncing the program as a grotesque caricature of the woman and her work. Noted Catholic writer and historian Paul Johnson called the documentary a diabolical and malicious attack by left-wing pro-pagandists. Another 130 viewers went so far as to lodge a complaint with the Independent Television Commission, which, after considering the matter, refused to sanction the station for broadcasting the film.

In Calcutta, several of Mother Teresa’s supporters rallied to her cause, calling the film biased. As of 2004, the film has yet to be shown in India, due in part to how expensive the film is to sell, though copies are available privately. Mother Teresa was undeterred by the controversy surrounding her. When asked about the film in an interview, she simply stated, “No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work.”4 However, the day after the program was shown, she did cancel a scheduled visit to Taiwan, but did not explain her reasons for doing so to anyone.

Despite the backlash against the film and Hitchens, there were those who applauded what the film tried to do. One reviewer writing for the
Guardian
stated that Hitchens was completely right in questioning what he called the “cult of Teresa.” Another supporter of the program was the Reverend Andrew de Berry, who had met Mother Teresa many years earlier when he was a chaplain-in-training. He recalled her telling an audience that she advised the women of Calcutta to have as many children as they wanted. De Berry then wrote that the experience stayed with him always; and undoubtedly many who died on the streets of Calcutta were the children of mothers who took Mother Teresa’s counsel.

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THE MISSIONARY POSITION

After
Hell’s Angel
Hitchens published a small book that picked up where the film left off. In
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory
and Practice,
Hitchens hoped to elaborate on Mother Teresa and her work, by “judging Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than the actions and words by her reputation.”5 According to Hitchens, Mother Teresa’s shining reputation was put upon her by the millions of people who needed to feel that someone, somewhere, is doing the things that they are not to help the poor. Further, Hitchens charged, Mother Teresa fed on this adoration, and, contrary to what she says, has not only come to accept it, but expects and even demands it.

Hitchens’s book posed some troubling questions. Among other things, Hitchens questioned how Mother Teresa spent the money she had raised.

Hitchens could find no satisfactory answer, and Mother Teresa consistently refused to discuss her financial affairs. As Hitchens stated, “The decision not to [fund a proper hospital], and to run instead a haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession, is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.”6

Mother Teresa’s apologists have often portrayed her as an innocent who professes to know little of business and politics, and who is concerned only with God and God’s will. In reality, as Hitchens points out, Mother Teresa kept some questionable company over the years. She has received hospitality, awards, publicity, and money from numerous persons with overt political motives or dubious business histories such as Robert Maxwell; the Duvaliers; President Ronald Reagan; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton; and Charles Keating, one of the key figures in the savings and loan scandal of the 1990s. The relationship with Keating was particularly galling. Keating made a generous donation to Mother Teresa as well as making his private jet available for her use. When Keating was imprisoned for fraud and em-bezzlement, Mother Teresa petitioned the trial judge to look kindly on him. When she received a reply from one of the prosecutors, explaining that the $10,000 she had received from Keating was stolen from innocent and not especially wealthy investors, Mother Teresa never answered the letter.