Mother Teresa was less interested in helping the poor than in using them to forward her Catholic beliefs
Aakriti is upset. She has completed her Masters and is set to go abroad for further studies. She is an upright, modern, no-nonsense girl who lives life on her terms. Talk to her and you will find an air of feminism, mixed with cosmopolitanism, oozing through her personality. So, what’s she upset aboutIJ “How can the Vatican ignore Mother Teresa while announcing sainthood for two of its PopesIJ This is truly the man’s world,” she grumbles. The issue, however, is not whether the Mother got canonised or not. It’s, after all, a matter of time when she will be officially granted sainthood. The real issue is: How could a 5ft-something nun, for whom abortion was “the greatest enemy of peace” and who had dogmatic views on contraception, abortion and divorce, move a young, modern Indian so passionatelyIJ Is it ignorance, or something elseIJ
Grappling with these questions, the death of Savita Halappanavar in October last year comes to the mind. Halappanavar, a Hindu of Indian origin, lost her life after suffering a miscarriage when she was 17 weeks pregnant. She died as she failed to get an abortion — primarily because “Ireland was a Catholic country”! This was a tragedy which could have been avoided, but for the extreme Catholic rigidity. Flashback 1992: At an open-air mass in Knock, Ireland, Mother Teresa thunders: “let us promise Our lady who loves Ireland so much that we will never allow in this country a single abortion. And no contraceptives.” So, by the six degrees of separation, Mother Teresa can be blamed for the Halappanavar tragedy. Ironically, Aakriti supports the Halappanavar cause and yet she is a Mother Teresa fan!
Such was — and has been — the enigma of Mother Teresa. She was a Catholic nun devoted to the life of religion and services, and yet she would not mind sharing space with dictators like Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti, or defending Charles Keating, a convicted conman, in court as “a friend of the poor”. She would pick a vulnerable kid from the streets of Calcutta and yet when people were dying at the Missionaries of Charity ‘Home’, ambulances were not called for; instead, they were prepared for death as per Christian rites. The Missionaries of Charity would get millions of dollars in aid, but her patients would be treated without painkillers and with syringes reused and rinsed in cold water. (Meg Greene, one of her prominent biographers, quotes the wife of a medical practitioner who had worked closely with the Mother as saying that the celebrated nun did not want patients to be treated; she expected them to die and would simply say, “Well, she’s gone to God.”) In 1984, when Bhopal witnessed an industrial disaster because of human negligence and greed, Mother Teresa hurriedly urged the victims to “forgive”. Christopher Hitchens was appalled by this ‘act of forgiveness’. “How did she know there was anything to forgiveIJ Had anybody asked for forgivenessIJ” asks he in the book, The Missionary Position.
Remind her of this ambiguity, and Aakriti says, “Mother Teresa worked relentlessly for the poor, and would embrace the lepers unconditionally. She would not mind cleaning their wounds with her bare hands. Who other than a saint will do itIJ” So, is it our guilt pang that brings us closer to the MotherIJ The guilt of doing nothing for our own people, despite all the wherewithal at our disposalIJ The guilt of not being able to breach the boundary of the caste system even at the sight of grave injustices being committedIJ So, when a nun does the same, we admire her, cherish her, make hefty donations to her — in the process, we make ourselves believe that we have done our bit without dirtying our hands. Helping — or even praising — Mother Teresa was a way to make amends.
No one can question the Mother’s commitment for the poor. But to see it through a secular prism would be wrong. The Mother’s mission in life was to promote religion rather than improve the lot of the poor. The most obvious reference was her call to thousands of pregnant Bangladeshi women, raped by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 liberation war, to have their babies; this was definitely in line with Catholic thinking, rather than humanitarian. Writes Australian author Germaine Greer, a Roman catholic herself: “When she (Mother) went to Dacca two days after its liberation from the Pakistanis in 1972, 3,000 naked women had been found in the army bunkers. Their saris had been taken away so that they would not hang themselves. The pregnant ones needed abortions. Mother Teresa offered them no option but to bear the offspring of hate.”
But then why blame Mother Teresa for all thisIJ She never claimed to be secular. She never pretended, as Hitchens writes, “that her work is anything but a fundamentalist religious campaign”. For her, the poorest of the poor were the instruments of this, “an occasion for piety”. The fact is we choose to ignore these inconvenient truths — for our own guilt of doing nothing for our wretched fellow beings, for our traditional sense of sainthood that doesn’t allow us to regard a saint to be partisan.