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Criticism Main article: Criticism of Mother Teresa

First criticisms

Eventually, Mother Teresa began to attract vituperative criticism in Western media. Barbara Smoker, ex-President of the UK National Secular Society, wrote a piece in the February 1980 issue of Freethinker entitled "Mother Teresa-Sacred Cow?" protesting against Mother Teresa's opposition to abortion and contraception. Nevertheless (and despite the demeaning title of her piece), she conceded Mother Teresa's "obvious sincerity" and called her "an amazing woman, a warm human being surging with maternal feeling". It was the atheist writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens who first chose to vilify and abuse her. In an article in the November 1992 issue of The Nation, he mentioned that he had visited her in Calcutta in 1980, and, while admitting that her small orphanage was "an exemplary place", he concluded that it was just an exercise in propaganda for "the Vatican's heinous policy of compelling the faithful to breed". In passing, he commented on her "butch style", called her a "leathery old saint", and accused her of "prostituting herself for the worst of neocolonialism and the worst of Communism". By way of objecting that she accepted donations from what he called "the worst of capitalism", he wrote that she "nursed at the ample tit of Charles Keating". Without any previous claims that could have justified the slur, he ended with a casual referrence to "the MT fraud".

A wider audience

In 1994, these criticisms received wider circulation. Mr. Tariq Ali for Bandung Productions, Aroup Chatterjee (as instigator), and Mr. Hitchens (as writer and presenter) collaborated on a polemical programme about Mother Teresa and her work, seeking to deflate her reputation in the West. Lasting 25 minutes and entitled Hell's Angel, it was broadcast in Britain on 8 November 1994 on Channel 4. Mr. Chatterjee later expressed himself unhappy with its "sensationalist approach" and many complaints were registered over its content. A British volunteer who had worked, for an undefined period, in the Home for the Dying in Calcutta, related in the film the adverse impressions she had received on her first day working there, particularly regarding the rudimentary medical care. Mr. Hitchens expanded his criticism in a 1995 book, The Missionary Position, and in 2003 when Mother Teresa was beatified, he again abused her as a "fraud" in an online article in which he disparaged her achievements and questioned her legacy. By 2007 Mr. Hitchens criticisms had abated in tone and content.

Areas of complaint

• Propagating Catholic moral teaching : Objections have consistently been made, most prominently by avowed atheists, that Mother Teresas's celebrity status afforded her an opportunity to present to a world-wide audience Catholic teaching on abortion and contraception.

• Bringing Calcutta into disrepute : A charge levelled by Aroup Chatterjee in his 2003 book Mother Teresa: the Final Verdict, who denied that Mother Teresa's work in Calcutta was as extensive as she claimed it to be, and argued that she aroused no interest in the city whose degraded image in the West (so he alleged) she had exploited.

• Disapproval of Mother Teresa's spending priorities : It has been objected that Mother Teresa ought to have spent money donated to the Missionaries of Charity on alleviating poverty or on improving the conditions of her Homes for the Dying, rather than on opening new convents and increasing missionary work. Against this line of criticism it has been pointed out that if the mission to the poor is understood as a deliberate quest to sanctify the world:-

  . . this defiance of modern medical standards becomes intelligible as a rational choice based on the preference for Christlike suffering and dependency on God over material comfort.

• Associating with sinners : Two lines of criticism are made (i) that Mother Teresa cultivated contacts with the rich and powerful, ignoring (so it is said) unsavoury details of their lives, and (ii) that she was undiscriminating in her international travels, allowing herself to be exploited by repressive governments anxious to improve their image in the West. Much is made of large donations received from Charles Keating, a financier whose business became the largest casualty of the Savings and Loans scandal in the USA and who was prosecuted and convicted of fraud in 1992. Despite Mr. Keating's convictions having been reversed on non-technical grounds in 1996, Mr. Hitchens never referred to this fact.

• The spirituality of suffering : Mother Teresa was criticised and mocked for her authentically Catholic conviction that suffering brings people closer to Jesus. In her words, it is "the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ."

• Rudimentary medical care offered at the homes : The quality of care offered to terminally-ill patients in the Homes for the Dying was adversely commented upon by European visitors, particularly the comparative lack of medical palliative care. Dr. Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, while admitting the difference in ethos between hospice care and the Homes for the Dying, described the medical attention in the latter as "haphazard", since volunteers without medical knowledge had to make decisions about patient care. He also observed that the community did not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, so that people who might otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment. It is acknowledged, even by critics, that "[o]nly when no city hospital will take the dying are they brought to the Missionaries of Charity."

• Disillusionment with The Rule : Those who join Catholic religious institutes make vows, including a vow of obedience to the Rule governing their particular institute. Some find themselves unable to persist with such vows and leave. One such was Colette Livermore, a former Missionary of Charity, who wrote a book about her experiences. Among her objections was the fact that the sisters declined to help the needy if they approached them at the wrong time. This would seem to be a reference to the priority of prayer in the life of the community. As another former Missionary put it: "when I was in Africa feeding a hungry child, if that bell [for group prayer] rang I would have to go and follow that".

• "Crisis of Faith" : During the course of the normal process observed within the Catholic Church with regard to causes for canonisation, certain private papers of Mother Teresa's were submitted by Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., the postulator, revealing her decades-long anguish that she could not sense God's presence. A fuller collection of these letters was subsequently published by him to mark the 10th anniversary of Mother Teresa's death. Many news outlets took them as indicating a "crisis of faith." Christopher Hitchens wrote: "So, which is the more striking: that the faithful should bravely confront the fact that one of their heroines all but lost her own faith, or that the Church should have gone on deploying, as an icon of favorable publicity, a confused old lady who it knew had for all practical purposes ceased to believe?" This topic is examined in depth in the following section.