Public image of Mother Teresa

Public image of Mother Teresa
Catholic nun and missionary Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, commonly known as Mother Teresa and known as Saint Teresa of Calcutta since 2016, has a complicated public image. She has been widely admired by many for her charitable work, which lead to her being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitutes a threat to peace". During her life she was highly celebrated, receiving multiple awards and honorary degrees, as well as consistently ranking as one of the world's most admired people. She is also venerated by many Catholics who consider her a saint and ask for her intercession.
She has also been subject to harsh criticism, including objections to the quality of the medical care which she provided, suggestions that some deathbed baptisms constituted forced conversions, and alleged links to colonialism and racism and alleged relationships with questionable public figures.
These criticisms have been rebutted by some commentators, with a notable theme being the claim that critics do not understand her motivations and that she is being unfairly held to Western standards.
Recognition and reception
In India
From the Indian government, under the name of Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu, Mother Teresa was issued a diplomatic passport. She received the Padma Shri in 1962 and the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in 1969. She later received other Indian awards, including the Bharat Ratna (India's highest civilian award) in 1980. Mother Teresa's official biography, by Navin Chawla, was published in 1992. In Calcutta, she is worshipped as a deity by some Hindus.
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of her birth, the government of India issued a special 5 coin (the amount of money Mother Teresa had when she arrived in India) on 28 August 2010. President Pratibha Patil said, "Clad in a white sari with a blue border, she and the sisters of Missionaries of Charity became a symbol of hope to many—namely, the aged, the destitute, the unemployed, the diseased, the terminally ill, and those abandoned by their families."
Internationally
Mother Teresa received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, given for work in South or East Asia, in 1962. According to its citation, "The Board of Trustees recognises her merciful cognisance of the abject poor of a foreign land, in whose service she has led a new congregation". By the early 1970s, Mother Teresa was an international celebrity. She had been catapulted to fame via Malcolm Muggeridge's 1969 BBC documentary, Something Beautiful for God, before he released a 1971 book of the same name. Muggeridge was undergoing a spiritual journey of his own at the time. During filming, footage shot in poor lighting (particularly at the Home for the Dying) was thought unlikely to be usable by the crew; the crew had been using new, untested photographic film. In England, the footage was found to be extremely well-lit and Muggeridge called it a miracle of "divine light" from Teresa. Other crew members said that it was due to a new type of ultra-sensitive Kodak film. Muggeridge later converted to Catholicism.
Around this time, the Catholic world began to honour Mother Teresa publicly. Pope Paul VI gave her the inaugural Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971, commending her work with the poor, her display of Christian charity and her efforts for peace. She received the Pacem in Terris Award in 1976.
She was honoured by governments and civilian organisations and appointed an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia in 1982 "for service to the community of Australia and humanity at large". The United Kingdom and the United States bestowed a number of awards, culminating in the Order of Merit in 1983 and honorary citizenship of the United States on 16 November 1996. Mother Teresa's Albanian homeland gave her the Golden Honour of the Nation in 1994, but her acceptance of this and the Haitian Legion of Honour was controversial. Mother Teresa was criticised for implicitly supporting the Duvaliers and corrupt businessmen such as Charles Keating and Robert Maxwell; she wrote to the judge of Keating's trial requesting clemency.
Universities in India and the West granted her honorary degrees. Other civilian awards included the Balzan Prize for promoting humanity, peace and brotherhood among peoples (1978) and the Albert Schweitzer International Prize (1975). In April 1976, Mother Teresa visited the University of Scranton in northeastern Pennsylvania, where she received the La Storta Medal for Human Service from university president William J. Byron. She challenged an audience of 4,500 to "know poor people in your own home and local neighbourhood", feeding others or simply spreading joy and love. Mother Teresa continued: "The poor will help us grow in sanctity, for they are Christ in the guise of distress". In August 1987, Mother Teresa received an honorary doctor of social science degree from the university in recognition of her service and her ministry to help the destitute and sick. She spoke to over 4,000 students and members of the Diocese of Scranton about her service to the "poorest of the poor", telling them to "do small things with great love".
During her lifetime, Mother Teresa was among the top 10 women in the annual Gallup's most admired man and woman poll 18 times, finishing first several times in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999 she headed Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century, out-polling all other volunteered answers by a wide margin. She was first in all major demographic categories except the very young.
Nobel Peace Prize
In 1979, Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize "for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitutes a threat to peace". She refused the conventional ceremonial banquet for laureates, asking that its $192,000 cost be given to the poor in India
Sainthood
Mother Teresa is a saint in the Catholic Church. Pope Francis canonised her at a ceremony on 4 September 2016 in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. Tens of thousands of people witnessed the ceremony, including 15 government delegations and 1,500 homeless people from across Italy. It was televised live on the Vatican channel and streamed online; Skopje, Mother Teresa's hometown, announced a week-long celebration of her canonisation. In India, a special Mass was celebrated by the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta.
Chatterjee, Hitchens, and Ali
Three prominent authors Aroup Chatterjee, Christopher Hitchens, and Tariq Ali, have made criticisms of Mother Teresa, often repeating or building on each other's claims.
Indian author and physician Aroup Chatterjee, who briefly worked in one of Mother Teresa's homes, investigated the practices of Teresa's order. In 1994, two British journalists, Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali, produced a highly critical British Channel 4 documentary, Hell's Angel, based on Chatterjee's work. In 2012, William Doino Jr, wrote that "The remarkable thing about Hell's Angel is that it purports to defend the poor against Mother Teresa's supposed exploitation of them, while never actually interviewing any on screen. Not a single person cared for by the Missionaries speaks on camera. Was this because they had a far higher opinion of Blessed Teresa than Hitchens would permit in his film? Avoiding the people at the heart of Teresa's ministry, Hitchens posed for the camera and let roll a series of ad hominem attacks and unsubstantiated accusations, as uninformed as they were cruel."
The next year, Hitchens published The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, a book that repeated many of the accusations in the documentary. Hitchens described Mother Teresa's organisation as a cult that promoted suffering and did not help those in need. Chatterjee published The Final Verdict in 2003, a less polemical work than those of Hitchens and Ali, but equally critical of Teresa's operations. According to Chatterjee, Mother Teresa's comments after Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's suspension of civil liberties in 1975 (The Emergency) were criticised by some outside India within the Catholic media. In 2003, after Teresa was beatified by John Paul II, Hitchens continued his criticism, calling her "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud." He further criticised the Catholic Church for attributing the recovery of a patient to a miracle, and for ignoring the testimony of the patient's doctor, who attributed the recovery of his patient to modern medicine. Chatterjee and Hitchens were called by the Vatican to present evidence against Teresa during her canonisation process.
In Hell's Angel and The Missionary Position, Hitchens leveled criticism at what he perceived to be Mother Teresa's endorsement of Albanian President Enver Hoxha, who in 1967, forcibly closed all religious facilities, including her own faith's Roman Catholic ones and also outlawed private worship. She visited Albania in August 1989, where she was received by Hoxha's widow, Nexhmije, Foreign Minister Reis Malile, Minister of Health Ahmet Kamberi, the Chairman of the People's Assembly Petro Dode, and other state and party officials, subsequently laying a bouquet on Hoxha's grave, and placed a wreath on the statue of Mother Albania.
Hitchens' allegations of forced baptisms
In The Missionary Position, Hitchens claims that Mother Teresa and her sisters performed forced baptisms; however, this has been disputed.
According to Hitchens, Mother Teresa encouraged members of her order to secretly baptise dying patients, without regard to the individual's religion. In his book Susan Shields, a former member of the Missionaries of Charity, states that "Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a 'ticket to heaven'. An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend that she was just cooling the patient's head with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptising him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa's sisters were baptising Hindus and Muslims." These allegations, if true, would be a breach of the Missionaries of Charity's constitution which states "it is never lawful for anyone to force others to embrace the Catholic Faith against their conscience".
In a review of Hitchens' book, Murray Kempton has argued that patients were not provided sufficient information to make an informed decision about whether they wanted to be baptised and the theological significance of a Christian baptism. Simon Leys, defending the Missionaries in a letter to the New York Review of Books, argued that baptisms provided by the sisters were either desired by the patient or an expression of "sincere concern and affection", and states that forced baptism is either beneficial or meaningless. He claimed that this criticism (originating from Christopher Hitchens, a famous atheist and antitheist) stems from anti-Christian sentiment.
Seton Hall University academic Dr Ines Murzaku says that accusations of forced conversion by the Missionaries of Charity are unfounded and are used by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to persecute Indian Christians.
Quality of medical care
In 1994, Robin Fox, then editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, visited the Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and described the medical care the patients received as "haphazard". He observed that sisters and volunteers, some of whom had no medical knowledge, frequently made decisions about patient care because of the lack of doctors in the hospice: "There are doctors that call in from time to time," Fox wrote, "but usually the sisters and volunteers (some of whom have medical knowledge) make decisions as best they can." Fox witnessed one patient with high fever being treated with paracetamol and tetracycline, an antibiotic, only to be later diagnosed with malaria by a visiting doctor, who prescribed chloroquine. Fox specifically held Teresa responsible for these conditions in the Home, writing, Mother Teresa "prefers providence to planning". Fox also observed that staff either declined to use or lacked access to blood films or "simple algorithms that might help the sisters distinguish" between curable and incurable patients: "Investigations, I was told, are seldom permissible".
Fox conceded that the regimen he observed included "cleanliness, the tending of wounds and sores, and loving kindness", but critiqued the sisters' "spiritual approach" to managing pain: "I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics. Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Theresa's [sic] approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement. I know which I prefer."
An article by David Jeffrey, Joseph O'Neill and Gilly Burn in The Lancet responded to Fox and argued that it was disingenuous to single out Mother Teresa's hospices for healthcare limitations that were common to most care facilities in India. They noted Indian healthcare generally suffered from: "1) lack of education of doctors and nurses, 2) few drugs, and 3) very strict state government legislation, which prohibits the use of strong analgesics even to patients dying of cancer". They concluded Mother Teresa's homes were being unfairly held to the standards of "Western-style hospice care[...] not relevant to India". Additionally, Mother Teresa never set out to set up hospitals or hospices, but rather places for those the hospitals would not accept.
Other criticisms
Mother Teresa died in 1997. Despite her request that all of her writings and correspondences be destroyed, a collection of them was posthumously released to the public in book form. Her writings revealed that she struggled with feelings of disconnectedness, that were in contrast to the strong feelings which she had experienced as a young novice. In her letters Mother Teresa describes a decades-long sense of feeling disconnected from God and lacking the earlier zeal that had characterised her efforts to start the Missionaries of Charity. As a result of this, she was judged by some to have "ceased to believe" and was posthumously criticised for hypocrisy. Thomas C. Reeves suggests that this criticism displays a basic unfamiliarity with the concept of the "dark night of the soul".
After the Jesuit priest Donald McGuire was convicted of sexually molesting multiple children, Mother Teresa was criticized for defending him and urging that he be reinstated to the ministry after he was initially removed.
In 2013, in a comprehensive review covering 96% of the literature on Mother Teresa, a group of Université de Montréal academics reinforced the foregoing criticism, detailing, among other issues, the missionary's practice of "caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it,[...] her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce". Questioning the Vatican's motivations for ignoring the mass of criticism, the study concluded that Mother Teresa's "hallowed image – which does not stand up to analysis of the facts – was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign" engineered by Catholic BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge.
In 2021, Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times published a column suggesting that some of Mother Teresa's actions were those of a cult leader.
Mother Teresa was at various points accused of perpetuating colonialism through a white saviour mindset.
Responses to criticism
In The Hindu, Navin B. Chawla states that Mother Teresa never intended to build hospitals, but to provide a place where those who had been refused admittance "could at least die being comforted and with some dignity." He also counters critics of Mother Teresa by stating that her periodic hospitalizations were instigated by staff members against her wishes, and disputes the claim that she conducted surreptitious baptisms. "Those who are quick to criticise Mother Teresa and her mission, are unable or unwilling to do anything to help with their own hands."
Sister Mary Prema Pierick, the former Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity, also stated that Mother Teresa's homes were never intended to be a substitute for hospitals, but rather "homes for those not accepted in the hospital... But if they need hospital care, then we have to take them to the hospital, and we do that." Sister Pierick also contested the claims that Mother Teresa deliberately cultivated suffering, and affirmed her order's goal was to alleviate suffering.
In The Spectator, Melanie McDonagh has noted that Mother Teresa is in large part "criticized for not being what she never set out to be, for not doing things which she never saw as her job.[...] What she wasn't was a head of government. She didn't address the fundamental causes of poverty because she was addressing the symptoms and she did that well," nor were her sisters social workers. McDonagh commented, "She wasn't trying to do anything except treat people at the margins of society as if they were Christ himself."
In New Internationalist, Mari Marcel Thekaekara notes that after the Bangladesh War, a few million refugees poured into Calcutta from the former East Pakistan, and argues that "No one had ever before done anything remotely like Mother Teresa's order, namely picking up destitute and dying people off the pavements and giving them a clean place to die in dignity."
Mark Woods in Christian Today felt that "perhaps just as significant, in terms of her public perception, is the sense among Christians that her critics don't really understand what she was doing. So to criticise her for opposing abortion and contraception, for instance, is to criticise her for not running a secular charity, which she never pretended to do."
Legacy and depictions in popular culture
At the time of her death, the Missionaries of Charity had over 4,000 sisters and an associated brotherhood of 300 members operating 610 missions in 123 countries. These included hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children's and family counselling programmes, orphanages and schools. The Missionaries of Charity were aided by co-workers numbering over one million by the 1990s.
Commemorations
Mother Teresa has been commemorated by museums and named the patroness of a number of churches. She has had buildings, roads and complexes named after her, including Albania's international airport. Mother Teresa Day, 5 September, is a public holiday in Albania. In 2009, the Memorial House of Mother Teresa was opened in her hometown of Skopje, North Macedonia. The Cathedral of Blessed Mother Teresa in Pristina, Kosovo, is named in her honour. The demolition of a historic high school building to make way for the new construction initially sparked controversy in the local community, but the high school was later relocated to a new, more spacious campus. Consecrated on 5 September 2017, it became the first cathedral in Mother Teresa's honour and the second extant one in Kosovo.
Mother Teresa Women's University, in Kodaikanal, was established in 1984 as a public university by the government of Tamil Nadu. The Mother Teresa Postgraduate and Research Institute of Health Sciences, in Pondicherry, was established in 1999 by the government of Puducherry. The charitable organisation Sevalaya runs the Mother Teresa Girls Home, providing poor and orphaned girls near the underserved village of Kasuva in Tamil Nadu with free food, clothing, shelter and education. A number of tributes by Mother Teresa's biographer, Navin Chawla, have appeared in Indian newspapers and magazines. Indian Railways introduced the "Mother Express", a new train named after Mother Teresa, on 26 August 2010 to commemorate the centenary of her birth. The Tamil Nadu government organised centenary celebrations honouring Mother Teresa on 4 December 2010 in Chennai, headed by chief minister M Karunanidhi. Beginning on 5 September 2013, the anniversary of her death has been designated the International Day of Charity by the United Nations General Assembly.
In 2012, Mother Teresa was ranked number 5 in Outlook India's poll of the Greatest Indian.
Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida is home to the Mother Teresa Museum.
Film and literature
Documentaries and books
Mother Teresa is the subject of the 1969 documentary film and 1972 book, Something Beautiful for God, by Malcolm Muggeridge. The film has been credited with drawing the Western world's attention to Mother Teresa.
Christopher Hitchens' 1994 documentary, Hell's Angel, argues that Mother Teresa urged the poor to accept their fate; the rich are portrayed as favoured by God. It was the precursor of Hitchens' essay, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.
Mother of The Century (2001) and Mother Teresa (2002) are short documentary films, about the life and work of Mother Teresa among the poor of India, directed by Amar Kumar Bhattacharya. They were produced by the Films Division of the Government of India.
Mother Teresa: No Greater Love (2022) is a documentary film featuring unusual access to institutional archives and how her vision to serve Christ among the poor is being implemented through the Missionaries of Charity.
Dramatic films and television
Mother Teresa appeared in Bible Ki Kahaniyan, an Indian Christian television series based on the Bible which aired on DD National during the early 1990s. She introduced some of the episodes, laying down the importance of the Bible's message.
Geraldine Chaplin played Mother Teresa in Mother Teresa: In the Name of God's Poor, which received a 1997 Art Film Festival award.
She was played by Olivia Hussey in a 2003 Italian television miniseries, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Re-released in 2007, it received a CAMIE award.
Mother Teresa was played by Juliet Stevenson in the 2014 film The Letters, which was based on her letters to Vatican priest Celeste van Exem.
Mother Teresa, played by Cara Francis the FantasyGrandma, rap battled Sigmund Freud in Epic Rap Battles of History, a comedy rap YouTube series created by Nice Peter and Epic Lloyd. The rap was released on YouTube 22 September 2019.
In the 2020 animated film Soul, Mother Teresa briefly appears as one of 22's past mentors.
Theatre
Teresa, la Obra en Musical is a 2004 Argentine musical based on the life of Mother Teresa
References
Further reading
Doino, William Jr. "Mother Teresa and Her Critics". First Things 2013.
Taylor, Adam. "Why Mother Teresa is still no saint to many of her critics". The Washington Post. September 1, 2016
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20th-century controversies
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