Mother Teresa: The Fault in her Sainthood

Mother Teresa, the pinnacle of human kindness was unanimously declared a Saint and canonized by The Vatican pope in 2016. And yet again, her deeds are being questioned and motives resurfaced. Originally known as Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu from Macedonia, she belonged to Roman Catholic faith and at the age of 18, joined a group of Irish nuns with an aim of spreading the word of God in India. She taught as a school teacher in St. Mary’s School of Calcutta till 1948. It was only in 1950 that the Saint decided to directly help the underprivileged Indians and devoted a charity to the dying. She spread the generosity to other parts of the world and the foundation was seen as the acme of benignity.

In 1952, she started a hospital, in Shanti Nagar of Calcutta, known as Nirmal Hriday. Magsaysay, Nobel Peace Prize awardee and a Bharat Ratna recipient, Mother Teresa is the most renowned missionary that the world has witnessed. Many of us know about the charitable and noble deeds of the saint, but it’s less known that she was a controversial figure even when alive. She was criticized for her questionable motives, disturbing ideology and unaccounted income. It was held that she would baptize the ill without their consent. In a documentary funded by Roop Chatterjee, a former worker in teresa’s homes, it was documented that the sanitation conditions of the hospitals would match to those of Hitler’s concentration camps. The syringes were reused without any sterilization to which “there was no point” according to mother teresa.

The volunteers were not trained to give medical assuages, instead the saint used exposed vulnerabilities of the ill to feed her motives. It was even claimed that the clothes were washed in urine and faeces near to the utensils. No heating geysers were allowed to be set up because that was the way “Jesus wanted it”. It was not out of lack of funds that the conditions could not be improved, because apparently she brought in about 30 million Dollars a year through funding. There is absolutely no proof that the missionary did anything to improve the overall conditions of the ill other than profiting out of it. Christopher Hitchens quoted in New York Times,” Mother Teresa was less interested in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs.”

She would allegedly glorify suffering rather than alleviating it. In a report titled Mother Teresa’s legacy, the undercover cop quoted the horrific incidents in the hospice- humans tied up like animals, a woman tied to a tree and babies tied up during feeding time. She was friends with questionable figures of that time, Lebanon’s chief who had mass murdered people, Robert Maxwell who was a bully, Charles Keating who was involved in 80s biggest financial scandal and Ronald Reagan who had murdered four American nuns and a Catholic archbishop.

Although Mother Teresa is seen as an inordinate person with a benevolent heart, her perspicacious yet controversial personality will always be a proof of how human- no matter how godly, at its very nature, is faulty.

Checkout more such content at: https://gogomagazine.in/category/magazine/writeups-volume-5/