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Criticism Main article: Criticism of Mother Teresa

First criticisms

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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 1980 entitled "Mother Teresa-Sacred Cow?" deriding her stance on 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 . .".[1] It was the atheist writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens who was the first to vilify and abuse her publicly. In an article published in 1992 he mentioned visiting her in Calcutta in 1980, and admitted that her small orphanage was "an exemplary place"; but he concluded it was a propaganda exercise 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 reprehending some sources from which she accepted donations, he wrote that she "nursed at the ample tit of Charles Keating". Without having made any previous claims to justify it, he ended with a casual reference to "the MT fraud".[2]

A wider audience

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In 1994, these criticisms received wider circulation. Mr. Tariq Ali (for Bandung Productions) and Mr. Hitchens (as writer and presenter) collaborated on a polemical programme about Mother Teresa. Lasting 25 minutes and entitled Hell's Angel, it was broadcast in Britain on 8 November 1994 on Channel 4. In one of the segments, a British volunteer who had worked, for an undefined period, in the Home for the Dying in Calcutta, related the adverse impressions she had received on her first day working there, particularly regarding the rudimentary medical care. Six years after her death, Mr. Aroup Chatterjee wrote a book criticisng Mother Teresa but expressing unhappiness with the "sensationalist approach" of the programme (which he claimed to have initiated), and, indeed, numerous complaints were lodged over its content. Mr. Hitchens expanded his criticism in a 1995 book, The Missionary Position. 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.[3] By 2007 Mr. Hitchens criticisms had abated in tone and content.[4]

Areas of complaint

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  • Propagating Catholic moral teaching : Objections were made, most prominently by avowed atheists, that Mother Teresas's used her celebrity status to present to a world-wide audience Catholic moral teaching.[5]
  • Bringing Calcutta into disrepute : Mr. Chatterjee denied that Mother Teresa's work in Calcutta was as extensive as claimed, and argued she was a nonentity in the city whose degraded image in the West she allegedly exploited.[6]
  • Disapproval of Mother Teresa's spending priorities : Some contended she should have spent money donors' money on alleviating poverty or on improving the conditions of her Homes for the Dying, rather than on extending her missionary network.[7] 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:-[8]

    . . 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 that she (i) cultivated contacts with the rich and powerful, ignoring allegedly unsavoury details of their lives, and (ii) allowed herself to be exploited by repressive governments.[9] Much is made of large donations received from Charles Keating, a financier involved in the largest casualty of the Savings and Loan crisis in the USA for which he was convicted of fraud in 1992.[10] Despite Mr. Keating's convictions having been reversed on non-technical grounds in 1996, Mr. Hitchens never mentioned this fact.[11][12]
  • The spirituality of suffering : Mother Teresa was mocked for her authentically Catholic conviction that suffering brings people closer to Jesus.[13] In her words, it is "the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ."[14]
  • The rudimentary medical care offered to terminally-ill patients in the Homes for the Dying was noted by some European visitors. Dr. Robin Fox, editor of The Lancet, while conceding that the Homes for the Dying were not hospices, described the medical attention in 1994 as "haphazard". He observed that no distinction was made between curable and incurable cases, leaving the former vulnerable to fatal infections from the latter.[15] Even critics acknowledge that "[o]nly when no city hospital will take the dying are they brought to the Missionaries of Charity."[16]
  • Disillusionment with The Rule was the subject of a book by a former Missionary of Charity.[17] Among the criticisms was the sisters' turning away the needy if approached at the wrong time. This would seem to refer 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".[18]
  • Mother Teresa's private papers were published by Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., the postulator of her cause for canonisation, to mark the 10th anniversary of her death. These revealed her decades-long anguish (hitherto unsuspected) at not sensing God's presence and provoked speculation in some quarters that she felt she was "a fake".[19] This topic is examined in the following section.

References

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  1. ^ Barbara Smoker, "Mother Teresa-Sacred Cow?", The Freethinker, February, 1980
  2. ^ Christopher Hitchens, "Mother Teresa, the Ghoul of Calcutta", The Nation, November, 1992, reprinted in For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports, Verso, London (1993)
  3. ^ Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 20 October, 2003 "Mommie Dearest", accessed 1 February 2014
  4. ^ Christopher Hitchens, Newsweek, 28 August, 2007 Hitchens Takes on Mother Teresa, accessed 1 February, 2014
  5. ^ Smoker (1980), Hitchens (1995), e.g., at pp. 14, 31f., 53-58
  6. ^ Chatterjee, chap 1; cf. Hitchens (1995), p. 22
  7. ^ Hitchens (1995), p. 63; Stern (1998); Chatterjee (2003)
  8. ^ Kwilecki and Wilson (1998), p. 212
  9. ^ Hitchens (1995), e.g. at pp. 5-7, 93, 98
  10. ^ Hitchens (1995), pp. 64f., and at p. 71: ". . it is the clearest and best documented instance . ."
  11. ^ Mr. Keating's state convictions for defrauding investors were reversed on the ground that the judge had incorrectly directed the jury that it was not necessary for the prosecution to establish that Mr. Keating had acted with "fraudulent intent". The convictions were reversed by a federal trial judge in April 1996 (upheld on appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals). In 2000, the US Supreme Court summarily declined to entertain the prosecution's application to restore the convictions. The federal conviction was overturned because the jury had improperly been informed of the convictions at state level. The federal charges were then settled in a plea bargain under which Keating pleaded guilty to fraud charges relating to bankruptcy, and in October 2000 the Supreme Court of the United States declined an application by California State prosecutors to reopen the state case on investor fraud. See, on this: an Associated Press report carried in The New York Times, 4 April, 1996 U.S. Judge Overturns State Conviction; James Sterngold, The New York Times, 3 December 1996, Judge Throws Out Keating Verdict; E. Scott Reckard, The Los Angeles Times, 3 October 2000, Supreme Court Lets Keating Case Dismissal Stand; all accessed 27 January 2014. In distinct civil proceedings, bondholders had won judgment against Mr. Keating for $1.6bn. As of 1996 (when the criminal convictions were set aside) those bondholders had received 74 cents for every dollar they had invested. See: James Sterngold, The New York Times, 3 December 1996, Judge Throws Out Keating Verdict accessed 2 February, 2014
  12. ^ He continued to rely on the Keating example, although in modified form, see, e.g. Hitchens (2007)
  13. ^ Hitchens (1995), pp. 41f.
  14. ^ In part, a quotation of Sacred Scripture: The First Letter of St Peter (1Pet.4:13)
  15. ^ Robin Fox, "Calcutta Perspective: Mother Theresa's care for the dying", The Lancet, Vol. 344, Issue 8925 (17 September, 1994), pp. 807-808
  16. ^ Review by Krishna Dutta of Chatterjee (2003), Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict in the British review Times Higher Education, 16 May, 2003, Saint of the gutters with friends in high places, accessed 29 January 2014
  17. ^ Livermore (2008)
  18. ^ Sebba (1997), p. 166, quoted in Kwilecki and Wilson (1998), p. 211
  19. ^ Mother Teresa (2007); cf. Hitchens (2007) and (without reference to fakery) Moore, Malcolm. "Mother Teresa's '40-year faith crisis'". The Telegraph. London. Retrieved 9 January 2014.
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